By Bruce B. Brugmann
When PG&E spits, City Hall swims. Mayor Newsom to Potrero Hill: Drop dead.
For more than 40 years, the Guardian has watched every San Francisco mayor without exception buckle to PG&E and help the giant utility keep its illegal private power monopoly intact in San Francisco.
The latest to buckle, this time more openly and ignominiously than most, appears to be Mayor Gavin Newsom, who is revving up his campaign for governor and wants to keep PG&E nice and cuddly by his side.
Here’s the story as it leaked from City Hall this weekend. For 40 years, the people of Potrero Hill and the southeastern part of the city have fought to close down the fossil-burning Mirant power plant at the bottom of Potrero Hill. Newsom personally supported the plan to close Mirant and replace it with city-owned peaker power plants. And his Public Utilities Commission has spent years developing a plan to do just this. (Alas, the peakers were the PUC’s only alternative and the PUC demanded that they be sited at the Mirant plant, amongst the long suffering Potrero Hillians, never a serious thought to anywhere more uptown. This rightly agitated the environmental justice community, but that is another story.)
PG&E has been fighting the peakers because they would be PG&Es worst nightmare: a major public power beachhead in San Francisco. As the historic vote neared last Tuesday at the Board of Supervisors, PG&E counted the votes and found it did not have a 6-5 majority. And so it did what it has historically done to protect its illegal private power monopoly in San Francisco, It rolled out its heavy artillery, went directly to the mayor, and started pounding away on a weak and wavering Newsom.
This time, as reported in the Bruce and Tim Redmond blogs, seven lobbyists (you heard me, seven) called on him in his City Hall office and told him to kill the peaker proposal, or else, and offered him a blank check to do a Mirant retrofit. Newsom buckled.
PG&E got Newsom to ask for an extension on the vote, which he got for a week, and he lamely announced that he would be looking for some kind of last minute alternative to the peakers PG&E so dreads. The alternative appears to be the PG&E alternative: junk the peakers and do a retrofit of the existing Mirant plant. This would subject the Potrero Hill neighborhood, and the mushrooming Mission Bay population, to the ruinous plant for the duration.
As a City Hall source put it to me, “This is the dumbest of all options, retrofitting the Mirant plant so that it’s a little cleaner, but still nowhere near as clean as the peakers, way less efficient, and a waste of land to boot. It is the mayor’s choice to avoid upsetting PG&E.” The vote is scheduled again for this Tuesday, but it may be postponed again if neither PG&E nor the peaker supporters don’t have the votes.
Hey, remember Dick Sklar, the former PUC executive director who Newsom recently appointed to the PUC to peddle the mayor’s PG&E policies (and remember Sup. Chris Daly, who cast the deciding vote for Sklar’s confirmation.and said that Sklar was “neutral” on PG&E.) Sklar was right in there as expected, pumping away for PG&E and helping facilitate the latest mayoral cavein to PG&E. As the Guardian has maintained for years, if people at City Hall want to work for PG&E, they should be dispatched to PG&E so they can work for the utility directly, not work for PG&E on the city payroll.
The only real way out of this PG&E uber alles mess is for the people to kick PG&E out of City Hall and bring real public power to the city. As Guardian readers know since 1969, San Francisco is the only city in the U.S. that is required by federal law to be a public power city, because of the Raker Act that allowed the city to dam Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park for the city’s water and power supply.
The best emerging plan is the public power initiative that Sups. Ross Mirkarimi, who opposes the peakers, and Aaron Peskin, who supports the peakers, are working on with public power forces to put on the fall ballot. Click here to read more about the initiative.
Question: Will Hearst corporate allow its reporters and editors to cover the PG@E/Raker Act scandal and the real public power story. Stay tuned for details and how the public can provide input and support.
To repeat: When PG&E spits, City Hall swims. Mayor Newsom to Potrero Hill: Drop dead.
P.S. Deadline summary: The vote lineup at blogtime, according to our check and City Hall sources. For: Peskin, Dufty, Maxwell, McGoldrick. Against: Mirkarimi, Ammiano, Daly, Alioto-Pier. Swinging away: Chu, Elsbernd, Sandoval. Prediction: The vote will be postponed again, probably until July or so, to give the PUC time to study the PG@E alternative put forth by Newsom. So PG@E may win this skirmish, but obviously the battle for public power and to enforce the Raker Act goes on.
B3, who watches the fumes from the Potrero plant every day from my office window at 135 Mississippi Street, courtesy of PG&E and Hearst journalism