Nancy McFadden, former senior VP at PG&E and now Gov. Jerry Brown's executive secretary, is third from the left.

photo by Rebecca Bowe

Remember when Pacific Gas & Electric Co. embarked on a $46 million political adventure called Proposition 16, the so-called Taxpayers' Right to Vote Act, which would have rendered it nearly impossible for municipal Community Choice Aggregation electricity programs to compete with the utility giant by requiring a two-thirds majority vote for their implementation?

Remember how the initiative drew scathing criticism from state legislators, including Senate Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, who wrote in a December 2009 letter to PG&E that Prop. 16 “calls into question your company’s integrity," and Sen. Mark Leno, who called it a "slap in the face to the legislature"?

And how even Michael Peevey, president of the California Public Utilities Commission, wrote in an op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News: "Pure and simple, Proposition 16 is a clever, brazen, buzzword-driven effort by one company to manipulate the California Constitution to protect its current monopoly.”

And how, at the end of that extraordinarily expensive campaign, PG&E lost, primarily because Prop. 16 was rejected by voters in its own service area?

Well, Governor Jerry Brown just appointed the brains behind the operation as one his executive secretaries, a position that's akin to chief of staff.

Nancy McFadden was senior vice president of PG&E from 2005 to 2010, and she has been publicly credited with dreaming up Prop. 16. Now, she'll serve in Brown's administration as an executive secretary along with Jim Humes, who was chief deputy attorney general to Brown. McFadden previously served as deputy chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore, and she also served in the Schwarzenegger and Davis administrations.