By Bruce B. Brugmann
The day after Earth Week, the Chronicle’s star columnists continued the Hearst policy of flacking for PG@E and censoring public power and greenwashing Earth Day coverage with a telling omission in their front page story on Monday April 23 how the San Francisco 49ers are hoping to get Santa Clara to pony up $l80 million or so for their $800 million new stadium.
In listing the various public fund possibilities for Santa Clara, Matier and Ross reported as a major option: “The reserve fund for Santa Clara’s electric utility. According to city officials, that fund exceeds $300 million.”
Then, two paragraphs later, the columnists wrote “That still leaves the Niners counting on tens of millions from the Silicon Valley Power reserves.” Wow, where do you suppose that kind of money comes from in a small city like Santa Clara deep down in the Peninsula? Matier and Ross know perfectly well where that money comes from. It comes from the fact that Santa Clara is a public power city, has been for years, and therefore has cheap public power that provides low electric rates for the city at the same time it provides huge gobs of money for the utility and the city.
The political and public policy point: Santa Clara gets the enormous advantage of public power. San Francisco, the only city in the country mandated by federal law to have public power (because of the Hetch Hetchy dam and the public power mandates of the federal Raker Act), does not. PG@E gets the huge profits from our Hetch Hetchy system, not San Francisco. That is the heart of the scandal.
Question for Matier and Ross (and Hearst corporate): Why didn’t you do normal reporting on this story, properly identify the Santa Clara utility as a public power utility, and explain the PG&E/public power context? When will you start telling the truth about the PG&E scandal? (Note: the Guardian is not for a moment suggesting that Santa Clara give up its public power reserves to the 49ers. In fact, we think the city will be much better off without the 49ers and the enormous public expense of subsidizing a stadium. We just think that it is high time for San Francisco to get the same kind of huge revenues and public power benefits that Santa Clara gets.)
Stay tumed, this is the tip of the biggest scandal in U.S. history involving a city and alas you may read about it only in the Guardian and the Bruce blog. Keep a sharp eye for more media greenwashing for PG&E. Let me know. B3