I’m not surprised that Matt Smith is once again looking for ways to bash the left, and that the SF Weekly is once again looking for ways to attack public power. But Smith’s latest piece is really screwy.
His thesis seems to be that the public-power movement is supporting the move to build city-owned power plants at the foot of Potrero Hill. Actually, that’s completely wrong.
There’s a measure headed for the fall ballot called the Clean Energy Act that would, among other things, move the city toward public power. But it has very little to do with the battle over the power plants.
The two cosponsors of the Clean Energy Act, Ross Mirkarimi and Aaron Peskin, are on opposite sides of the power-plant issue. And even a cursory read of the Guardian blogs demonstrates that the activists are by no means of one mind on this.
The whole idea that the peakers were a public-power plot is pretty laughable, since NONE of the leading public-power activists had anything to do with the idea in the first place. (And later, when it came out of the SFPUC — which again, has NEVER been a bastion of public-power activism) some of us liked the idea and some of us didn’t.
And the Peskin measure that Smith talks about has nothing to do with public power either.