Editorial: Stopping PG&E's fraudulent initiative
Every elected official, city council, board of supervisors, and utility agency in the state needs to immediately come out publicly in opposition to the initiative and start organizing to defeat it. San Francisco elected officials, including City Attorney Dennis Herrera, need to lead the charge since San Francisco is the only city in the U.S. mandated by federal law to have public power (which it doesn't have, thanks to PG&E's corrupting influence through the decades.)
EDITORIAL A ballot measure that could spell the end of public power in California is headed for either the spring or fall 2010 ballot — and so far, the opposition is missing in action. This is a profoundly important issue, and every elected official, city council, board of supervisors, and utility agency in the Bay Area needs to immediately come out in opposition and start organizing to defeat it.
The source of the proposition, of course, is Pacific Gas and Electric Co. PG&E is facing political wildfires all over the state as communities rebel against bad service and high rates. In Marin County, a community choice aggregation (CCA) plan is moving along, full speed. In San Francisco, CCA is a little slower, but still on track. These efforts could turn two of PG&E's most profitable territories into public power beachheads. Meanwhile, in San Joaquin County, a public power movement is trying to take over part of PG&E's service area, and PG&E just spent millions of dollars fighting a similar effort in Davis.
So the utility has decided to fight back — not just in the local communities where activists can beat PG&E back, or in the state Legislature, where the giant company has fewer and fewer friends, but with a ballot initiative that has a misleading name, a misleading political message — and tens of millions of dollars to back it up.
Signature-gatherers are out in force already, collecting names for a measure called "New two-thirds requirement for local public electricity providers." The paid petition crews are describing it as a "right to vote" measure, giving the public a chance to weigh in on government action.
What the measure would really do is require a two-thirds affirmative vote before any public power agency could add new customers, or any local agency could get into the power business. It would force the existing CCA movements to get two-thirds of the local voters to approve their efforts.
That's an almost impossible standard — particularly when PG&E spends millions to block public power efforts everywhere they appear.
The two-thirds voting requirement is increasingly being assailed as undemocratic. The state Legislature has been paralyzed by its own two-thirds requirement for passing a budget, and there are multiple moves to reduce that threshold. The two-thirds mandate for passing local taxes has been widely blamed for driving cities and counties to the brink of fiscal ruin.
And yet PG&E is trying to add a new, crushing mandate — aimed entirely at snuffing out public power advances. The impact on the state will be enormous. As Megan Rawlins reports in this week's paper, high PG&E rates and the lack of public power cost the San Francisco economy alone as much as $2.8 billion a year. Multiply that by a factor of 10 or 20, and you see what a devastating financial blow this PG&E move would be to California's crumbling economy.
So where, exactly, is the opposition?
Sup. Ross Mirkarimi called a meeting last week at the offices of the Utility Reform Network (TURN) to try to get other public power communities involved in a statewide campaign. But it's been slow going.
That's not going to work. Every elected agency in the Bay Area needs to get this on the agenda — now. Every city official (starting with Mayor Gavin Newsom, who wants to be governor) and every state official (starting with Attorney General Jerry Brown, who also wants to be governor) needs to loudly and publicly denounce this move, help establish a high-level coalition to beat it back, and start raising money for the campaign.
There may be a legal strategy, too. The law that authorized cities and counties to set up CCAs bars PG&E and other private utilities from interfering with local CCA efforts — and it's pretty clear that this initiative is designed to do exactly that. City Attorney Dennis Herrera needs to immediately investigate the possibility of suing to get this disastrous initiative off the ballot.
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Comments (3)
My PG&E Bill is damn fair!
Posted by nick lewis | September 23, 2009 02:00 AM
First, Mr. Lewis should realize that his electricity bill would be a dam site lower if he lived in a public-power city, such as Sacramento, Alameda, Palo Alto, Santa Clara or Los Angeles.
Second, regardless of how one feels about public- vs. private-sector utilities, the key issue here is that the PG&E-backed initiative would sabotage the democratic principle of "one person, one vote." That alone is reason to oppose it.
Posted by Gino Rembetes | September 24, 2009 05:18 PM
Just to clarify, how do CCAs generally garner votes? It was my understanding that these were "opt-out" initiatives so if I were a voter, for example, who knew nothing about a CCA or what it would provide (because they didn't publicize this information), and I chose not to vote on that particular initiative, my vote, in the end, would actually be in favor of it. To me, this seems equally misleading.
One thing I would want to ask before ever voting in favor if a CCA is how exactly they would plan to maintain, let alone lower, my rates if they are seeking such ambitious renewable resource goals. Let's face it, alternative energy is not cheap. And the technology to produce it is not developed enough to support a population as large as ours. Don't get me wrong, I am all for lower rates and more renewable energy, I just think that this editorial and many like it are a bit hypocritical. All I'm asking for is transparency and honesty on both sides of the issue.
Posted by Lynne Wilson | November 10, 2009 06:27 PM