THE SAN FRANCISCO Public Utilities Commission, under general manager Susan Leal, continues to stall, obfuscate, and throw bureaucratic rocks in the path of anything that even remotely looks like public power. It's infuriating, and if the commission members won't turn Leal around (or fire her), then the Board of Supervisors should look seriously at completely reconstituting the agency.

The latest example: at the Local Agency Formation Commission meeting Feb. 11, PUC staffers offered a weak, biased, and utterly incomplete presentation on community-choice aggregation, a program that would allow San Francisco residents to band together and buy power directly from suppliers, sidestepping Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s local monopoly. The entire presentation consisted of a PowerPoint show – no paperwork, no final report, no details anywhere. On the basis of scant evidence, the PUC argued – counter to all logic and past studies – that aggregation would actually be more expensive than sticking with PG&E. That's nonsense: as energy expert Paul Fenn noted, the PUC simply ignored the fact that the city is moving forward with a huge new solar plan that will provide cheap renewable power to offset any transition costs.

The whole thing was emblematic of the attitude we've seen since Leal got rid of Ed Smeloff, the only public power expert on the staff, and began undermining even moderate energy plans that might possibly be a tiny bit offensive to PG&E. This has got to stop.

If LAFCO doesn't get a workable, detailed – and accurate – study on aggregation by the next meeting, the panel should simply reject the PUC's work and adopt an alternative plan Fenn is preparing. And the whole fiasco only indicates that Mayor Gavin Newsom can't be trusted to appoint commissioners who will properly direct the PUC on public power issues – and it may be time for a charter amendment giving the supervisors the power to directly appoint a majority of the commission.