Public Power

Carolyn Knee is free! Finally, after five years, the poster girl for ethics reform has been freed by the Unethical Commission

-
0

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Rick Knee flashed the word from City Hall about 6:35 p.m. Monday (July 9): Carolyn Knee is free!.

In a follow up email that was uncharacteristically short, Carolyn’s husband wrote, “The Ethics Commission voted unanimously Monday evening to accept the $267 settlement that staff members and Carolyn’s attorney reached.
This concludes the case.”

Well, this case may be closed and the long nightmare and high drama may be over for the Knees, who took the brunt of the commission’s wrath for the 2002 grassroots public power campaign that damn near kicked PG&E out of City Hall, but their fight was well worth it and the battle for ethics reform goes on. Carolyn’s rousing defense even made nice folks out of the commission and staff, at least for one hearing.

SOS: The Unethical Commission goes into session Monday night on the Case of the Grassroots Treasurer who went up against PG&E in a tight public power campaign. Come and support Carolyn Knee at the Ethics meeting at 5:30 p.m. in City Hall room 408

-
0

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Carolyn Knee, the poster girl for how the Ethics Commission is unethically treating treasurers of grassroots campaigns, goes once more before the Ethics Commission at a hearing starting at 5:30 p.m. Monday (July 9) in Room 408 in City Hall.

Carolyn and her attorney have reached a settlement of $267 with the commission’s enforcement division, which is one per cent of the amount the staff originally recommended.
But public power supporters fear that the reason her case is on the agenda once again is because at least two commissioners intend to raise questions about the recommended amount.

Carolyn, a retiree on a fixed income, found herself threatened with $26,700 in fines by the Ethics Commission for several alleged violations of campaign finance laws during a random audit of San Franciscans for Affordable Clean Energy, the grassroots group that forced PG&E to the ballot in the 2002 public power campaign.
The point: SFACE raised peanuts during the campaign (a little more than $l00,000) while PG&E spent more than $2 million to defeat the initiative, $800,000 in the final days of the campaign (and PG&E didn’t report this critical amount until nearly a month after the election.) Knee was fined l4 times what James Sutton, treasurer of PG&E’s front group, was fined. And the commission hassled and hounded her for the past five years or so. (See Amanda Witherell’s excellent story, “The ethics of Ethics,” in the Guardian and on our website and an earlier Bruce blog headed “Free Carolyn Knee! Free Carolyn Knee from the Clutches of the Unethical Commission.”)

The ethics of Ethics

-
0

Part one in a Guardian series

› amanda@sfbg.com

Back in 2002, Carolyn Knee did what many other citizens of San Francisco were doing — she volunteered her time and energy campaigning for a ballot measure she hoped would pass.

Five years later the retiree living on a fixed income has found herself threatened with $26,700 in fines levied by the Ethics Commission enforcement staff, who turned up several alleged violations of campaign finance laws during a random audit of San Franciscans for Affordable Clean Energy, the committee for which Knee was a volunteer treasurer.

At a June 11 probable cause hearing before the Ethics Commission, investigator Richard Mo itemized several infractions, including failure to report $19,761 in contributions on time, in addition to another $9,500 that came in right before the election but wasn’t reported until afterward; failing to notify two organizations that they were major donors who needed to file as such (one of which was the Guardian); not providing all the required information about two donors; and disparities between bank account statements and campaign finance reports.

Mo alleged Knee had "cooked the books," saying she "takes no responsibility" and "claims she was ignorant of the law, passes the blame on to her personal accountant. She cites her inexperience as a treasurer when in fact she served as treasurer for one prior committee."

It sounds like a litany of campaign crime, with Knee as the linchpin, but she maintains that none of it was intentional and that many of the reporting mistakes were made by her accountant, Renita Lloyd-Smith of the Simon Group, a company she’d hired to handle the complicated ledger of campaign finance reports. "Perhaps I was wrong in placing confidence in someone I had to hire because I didn’t know the rules," Knee told the Ethics Commission. "It was all in good faith. It was all done in love of my city. But I’ll never do it again."

Those words have a dual meaning: Knee hopes never to make another financial mistake, and she’ll never again take on the risk of steering the financial helm of a grassroots campaign.

Ethics Commission hearings such as this are usually held in closed session, but this one was opened at Knee’s insistence because she suspected she’s not the only one who’s had difficulties handling campaign finance laws or negotiating fair settlements. It was the first publicly aired probable cause hearing in the commission’s 13-year history, and both commissioners and attendees walked away with questions after issues of perceived bias and a lack of timeliness in the investigation were raised, as well as the possibility that the fines being threatened are inflated and arbitrary.

"There’s only one department in the city and county of San Francisco with no oversight — Ethics," Joe Lynn told the Guardian. Lynn is a former Ethics commissioner and staffer who still watchdogs the agency and has been openly critical of the laxness he perceives there.

His question is one of many about the commission: How does the staff conduct its investigations? Should smaller campaigns staffed with volunteers be handled differently than larger, more professionally managed operations? If resources are tight, should Ethics be more focused on going after the big guys? If the commission had more resources, would the public benefit from both a greater understanding of campaign laws and a more open, honest, and just government?

SFACE raised a little more than $100,000 during the 2002 election season (including about $29,000 from the Guardian and editor and publisher Bruce B. Brugmann), but the measure it supported — Proposition D, which would have allowed the city to set up its own public power system and break ties with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. — failed.

PG&E spent more than $2 million defeating Prop. D, $800,000 of it in the final days of the race, which campaign attorney James Sutton, the treasurer of the utility’s front group, San Franciscans Against the Blank Check, didn’t report until nearly a month after election day, a violation of campaign finance laws. That act likely scored SFACE’s opponents the win.

The Ethics Commission staff launched an investigation, and in 2004, Sutton’s old law firm was fined $100,000 — the largest amount ever levied by the city for breaking election laws. The state Fair Political Practices Commission also slapped Sutton with $140,000 in fines for vioutf8g the Political Reform Act (see "Repeat Offender," 10/27/04).

At Knee’s recent hearing, Lynn, who was once a finance officer for the Ethics Commission, pointed out she was being fined 14 times what Sutton was fined, and if the same formula had been applied, his fine would have been nearly $1.5 million. "You can’t change the standards arbitrarily," Lynn cautioned the five commissioners. "You need to establish standards for these fines, and you need to keep them across the board."

According to the governing law, which mirrors state mandates at the FPPC, commissioners may levy a fine of up to $5,000 or three times the amount of the violation, whichever is greater. Knee’s fine could be as much as $230,000, and Sutton’s could have been $2.4 million — about the same amount that it costs to run the Ethics office for a year.

The Ethics Commission has never imposed the maximum fine, and executive director John St. Croix doesn’t like to draw comparisons between campaigns. "They’re like snowflakes, very different," he said.

A review of the past three years of enforcement history, posted on the commission’s Web site, bears out this truth and shows fines ranging from a sliver to as much as half of the contested amount. In many cases, fines are dismissed completely for financial hardship reasons. The commission does not abide by a formula, fearing that would handicap it during negotiations, but a number of considerations are weighed, including the experience of the campaign treasurer, the appearance of intent, the overall outcome of the election, and a willingness to make right.

Eric Friedman, spokesperson for New York City’s Campaign Finance Board, considered by many good-government activists to be the national gold standard for ethics groups, said its members use similar tactics for settlements, but "the structure that they follow is precedent. They’ve seen pretty much everything at this point." New York’s board is about five years older than San Francisco’s and audits all campaigns.

According to investigator Mo, the $26,700 in fines pointed at Knee was an "opening salvo" designed to inspire negotiations, which have not been smooth. Knee and her pro bono lawyer, David Waggoner, initially offered $500 to settle. Ethics continued to press for more, but Knee didn’t flinch. "I don’t think I should have to pay anything," she said, pointing out that Oliver Luby, the commission’s current fines officer, recommended a complete waiver of all fines. St. Croix said Luby doesn’t work in the enforcement division and doesn’t know all the facts of the case. The current settlement offer from Ethics is $267, which Knee is willing to accept if the commissioners agree.

It’s unclear how often such hardball is played. "Frankly, we took that settlement because that’s what they were willing to pay," St. Croix said of the Sutton case. So too with a $17,000 fine imposed on Andrew Lee for a variety of campaign finance violations (see "Enforcing Equity," 5/2/07). St. Croix said that was what Lee was willing to pay on the spot.

"I’m not sure we could set a standard," said Commissioner Eileen Hansen, who thought both the Lee and the PG&E fines were too low and said if that’s the bar, it should be raised. She pointed out that the law does provide guidance, but read literally, it could mean exorbitant fines for the same slipup echoed through a whole season of paperwork. "I think it’s a good thing to have the law," she said, but "some should pay the maximum amount and some should pay less."

"I’m happy to pay $250 to get it out of the way," Knee said. "This has taken so much of my time and energy." When asked about her audit experience, she replied, "I would never do this again. It totally discourages grassroots" campaigns.

A legal assistant for 25 years, Knee was not a professional accountant but did have experience doing some bookkeeping. "The IRS is like kindergarten compared to the Ethics Commission," she said.

David Looman, a professional treasurer who’s currently managing about 10 campaign accounts and undergoing three audits by the Ethics Commission, agrees that the potential liability is a huge risk. "Twenty years ago when I started in politics in this town, nobody paid for a treasurer. Nobody had a lawyer. Nowadays you’d be crazy not to do both," he said.

The audits in Looman’s cases involve small grassroots campaigns similar to the one Knee oversaw. "There’s no good business principle for why these people should be audited," Looman said. "The fewer resources you have to employ, the more intelligent your decisions should be for how to employ them. Here they are auditing my $12,000 committee when there are clear miscreants running around."

Part of the Ethics Commission’s charter calls for mandatory audits of all publicly financed campaigns, and St. Croix said the agency does as many random audits as resources allow. Last year, he recalled, more than a dozen were completed. With full financial backing, St. Croix said, he would audit all campaigns. He said, "It’s funny. People know they’re going to get audited and they still try to get away with stuff."<\!s>*

Next: what does the Ethics Commission need to rein in the most frequent and flagrant violators?

Turning the tides

-
0

› amanda@sfbg.com

On June 19 the Board of Supervisors cast its final ayes in favor of San Francisco’s new plan for public power, Community Choice Aggregation, which allows the city to own or purchase as much as 51 percent of the electricity for its residents and businesses from renewable sources. The plan’s goal is to meet or beat the rates of the city’s current provider, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which draws 13 percent of its power from renewable sources. CCA has become the popular choice for public power fans, who have long pushed the city to get a divorce from PG&E’s monopoly.

But across town the same day, it looked as if Mayor Gavin Newsom was renewing nuptial vows with the $12 billion utility. In front of the charming backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge, Newsom announced a partnership between the city and PG&E to look into tidal power. He promised "the most comprehensive study yet undertaken to assess the possibilities for harnessing the tides in San Francisco Bay."

PG&E committed as much as $1.5 million, which will bolster $146,000 from the city and a $200,000 grant from the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.

The news conference had public-power advocates wondering about Newsom’s real commitment to renewable, locally owned power. "I’ve asked all the members of the Board of Supervisors," Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told the Guardian. "That press conference — nobody knew it was taking place." He said a mayoral aide later apologized that his office hadn’t been informed, but he added, "I don’t think it was a mistake that it occurred on the same day as the vote for CCA."

The Mayor’s Office said the scheduling was purely coincidental and had been on the books for at least three weeks, but it did not issue a news release about the news conference, and no media advisory was sent to us.

Parties involved in the deal say it will bring more money to researching a shaky, untested technology — even if it means that the power any project generates could be controlled by PG&E. "We’re always going to have that issue of ownership later, and I’d rather get the research data into the public domain," said Jared Blumenfeld, director of the city’s Department of the Environment (SFE).

Blumenfeld insisted that the deal would give the public direct oversight of all research, including work done by the private utility. The memorandum of understanding between San Francisco, PG&E, and Golden Gate Energy, which holds the permit license for tidal energy in the bay, makes it clear that all information will be shared by all parties and open to public scrutiny.

Newsom made a similar announcement in September 2006, when he called for the creation of a Tidal Power Advisory Group and allocated $150,000 for a feasibility study through the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and the SFE. But that program hasn’t gone far — and the little that has happened is secret.

A review of the agendas and minutes of SFPUC and SFE commission meetings shows only scant and passing mention of tidal power. The Tidal Power Advisory Group eventually came to fruition as one of five subcommittees of the Clean Tech Advisory Council, a 16-member board of local "green" business executives, entrepreneurs, and environmental experts that was formed at the call of the mayor in November 2005. Chaired by William K. Reilly, an Environmental Protection Agency administrator under George H.W. Bush, the council neither announces meetings or agendas nor makes public its minutes.

A special subcommittee devoted to tidal and wave energy has worked closely with the SFPUC to advance a feasibility study. The contract for that study went without bid to URS Corp. and will continue in conjunction with the new PG&E partnership.

URS, an international engineering, design, and construction firm based in San Francisco and formerly run by Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum, has a long history with the city. The tidal power study was not subject to competitive bids and was awarded to URS because the company had undertaken significant computer models of the entire Bay Area for a past proposal to fill in part of the waterway to extend runways at San Francisco International Airport, Blumenfeld said. That plan was shot down, but the environmental impact report it spawned contains information relevant to studying tidal power.

Additionally, URS has an as-needed work agreement with San Francisco, Blumenfeld said, "and everything moves glacially" in regard to contracting with the city.

The kind of tidal power being considered — called "in-stream" and analogous to a wind farm of water-pushed turbines — is such a new technology that there is only one deployment in the world that’s generating more than one megawatt of energy. One megawatt is enough to power about 1,000 average homes. The Electric Power Research Institute released a study in 2006 concluding that the Golden Gate has the potential to generate 237 megawatts but suggesting that only 15 percent of that — about 35 megawatts — would be available without negative environmental impact.

"I think that number’s made up, personally," said Mike Hoover, a partner at Golden Gate Energy. "We know the energy that’s coming in and out of the bay is more than that."

URS, which has conducted no other tidal power studies in the United States, may support those findings, but the outlook at this point doesn’t bode well. "It appears EPRI used optimistic assumptions on water velocities," the SFPUC’s Power Enterprise director, Barbara Hale, wrote to officials in the Mayor’s Office and at the SFPUC and the SFE. "Our feasibility study estimates around 10 MW extractable power, peak, and five MW on average with a commercial plant." Additionally, Hale wrote, the cost per kilowatt-hour could be closer to 20 cents than the 5.5 cents the EPRI predicted.

Hale told us it’s difficult to say how much power would make dropping a pilot project into the bay feasible, and the best-case scenario has a pilot project four or five years away. An actual grid connection of any significance would be several years in the future.

Then there’s the huge issue of who would own the power. San Francisco Bay is considered a public trust — and under any reasonable policy scenario, the power generated by its tides should belong to the public.

After hearing about the mayor’s handshake with PG&E, Mirkarimi introduced legislation at the June 19 board meeting that would require any power harnessed in the bay to be publicly owned. He said tidal technology is still at an "embryonic stage," but the memorandum of understanding "that was unilaterally devised by the mayor and the PUC at the exclusion of the Board of Supervisors demonstrates an early intention to give the new technology to the profiteers, and that alarms me."*

No PG&E tidal deal

-
0

EDITORIAL On June 19, just as public power advocates in San Francisco were celebrating victory on the passage of Community Choice Aggregation, Mayor Gavin Newsom held a press conference at the privatized Presidio to announce that the city is forming an alliance with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to study tidal power.

Amazing. PG&E has been cheating the city out of cheap public power for more than 80 years now. The $12 billion utility is fighting the city in court over rights to sell power to customers in public buildings. Its energy mix is barely 15 percent renewable and includes one of the nation’s most dangerous nuclear power plants. And Newsom still wants to give his faith — and the city’s energy future — to PG&E.

It’s a terrible idea. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has offered legislation that would mandate that any publicly funded tidal power be owned entirely by the city, and the supervisors should pass that measure quickly to block this sellout deal. And Newsom — who absolutely must sign the CCA ordinance — needs to get a clue: San Francisco should never, ever do any business with PG&E. *

PS Call the mayor’s office at (415) 554-6131 and tell Newsom to give PG&E the boot.

What is the new new “low” in city politics? It sure isn’t Daly, Newsom, and the cocaine use charges. Public Power SOS: scroll down for the news and the action alert

-
0

By Bruce B. Brugmann

On the front page of today’s San Francisco Chronicle, June 2l, Mayor Gavin Newsom is pictured, grim, scowling, arms clenched, over this caption:

“Mayor Gavin Newsom denies Supervisor Chris Daly’s suggestion that he has used cocaine. “That’s how low politics now has gotten in this city, and I seriously thought it couldn’t get much worse.”
The story by City Hall Reporter Cecilia M. Vega had this head: “CITY HALL UPROAR AT COCAINE CLAIM,” with this subhead, “Angry Newsom blasts Daly for bringing politics to a new low.”

This jolly back and forth, I submit, is far from a new low. (See City Editor Steve Jones’s blog in our politics blog.)
For starters, I would submit there is a new new low and a most timely new new low at that. This new new low is the fact that Newsom, despite the public power mandates of the federal Raker Act, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the crucial Ammiano/Mirkarimi CCA legislation approved by the Supervisors only last Tuesday, reversed his public pledges supporting CCA and public power and clambered into bed in hot embrace on Tuesday with PG&E. (See my previous blog.) He allowed PG&E to call the shots in a PG&E-arranged and PG&E- promoted press conference at the Presidio announcing that the city in effect was turning over its public study of tidal power to the private utility that has perpetuated the PG&E/Raker Act scandal for decades.

This is the new new low: the scandal of how the mayor of the City and County of San Francisco, after PG&E has privatized and stolen the city’s cheap, green Hetch Hetchy power, and after PG&E helped privatize and steal the Presidio, was in effect turning over the choppy waters of the bay and the ocean to PG&E to privatize and steal. Incredible. Newsom was doing his damndest to put PG&E in the catbird seat on the next giant step on power generation and to further entrench the illegal private utility in City Hall. No wonder Newsom gets so “agitated” over the handy dandy issue of whether he did or did not use cocaine.

The PG&E/Raker Act Scandal: the biggest urban scandal in U.S. history just got a lot bigger!

-
1

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, the veteran public power advocate, flashed the word from City Hall by email at ll:42 a.m. Tuesday, June l9.

“I just learned,” Mirkarimi wrote, “that the mayor is announcing a deal on tidal power today. I view this as a direct launch to derail or at least distract from community choice power. (PG@E has another poll in the filed on cca as of Sunday.) I’m going to try to blunt his move with the introduction of a tidal power ordinance so that we can hopefully
control the design protocol.”

Then, at ll:35 a.m. Tuesday, PG@E sent out a press release even before the press conference ended. It went out via the PR Newswire for Journalists and was titled “PG@E, San Francisco and Golden Gate Energy Combine efforts to explore Tidal Power Options in SF Bay.”

The head, lead, and text made the key point loud and clear: San Francisco, despite the public power mandates of the federal Raker Act, had once again caved in to PG&E and was allowing PG&E to fund and control a crucial study of tidal power for the city. PG&E was also calling the shots on the press announcement and doing it as a timely and telling part of its campaign to undermine the passage of community choice aggregation. The city, as Guardian readers know, is in violation of the Raker Act because it allows PG&E to control the city’s supply of cheap clean public power from its Hetch Hetchy dam in Yosemite National Park.

Free Carolyn Knee! Free Carolyn Knee from the unethical clutches of the Ethics Commission!

-
0

By Bruce B. Brugmann

There is a phrase I like to use to describe the power that PG&E has exercised in City Hall since the beginning of time, or at least since the federal Raker Act was passed in l9l3 mandating that San Francisco get public power from its Hetch Hetchy dam.

When PG&E spits, City Hall swims.

That is the phrase I used when I testified Monday night June ll at the Ethics Commission hearing in the infamous Carolyn Knee case. “You’re all swimming in it,” I told the commission.

I was trying to illustrate my key point: that the Commission, which had been created to expose and penalize the campaign and financial muscling of PG&E and the big guys in town, was now picking on the little guy, in this case Carolyn Knee, the woman who volunteered for the thankless job of being the treasurer of two citizens’ groups that put initiatives on the ballot in 200l and 2002 to do what the city had never done. And that was to kick PG&E out of City Hall, enforce the public power mandates of the Raker Act, and bring our own cheap green Hetch Hetchy public power to the residents and businesses of San Francisco. PG&E, the groups maintained, had an illegal private power monopoly and the citizens were forced to take this law and order issue into their own hands and go to war with PG&E.

CCA full steam ahead

-
0

by Amanda Witherell

Yesterday the Board of Supes overwhelmingly endorsed the Community Choice Aggregation public power plan with a 10-1 vote. Ed Jew dissented…maybe one of his last nays. Michaela Alioto-Pier cast a “no” on the second vote for the governance structure, but that 9-2 tally is still veto-proof. Alioto-Pier wanted to tweak some language as well, which is being done and there will be another wee vote next week on it, but nothing suggests support will flag over the coming days.

Web Site of the Week

-
0

www.communitychoiceenergy.org


Just what the heck is Community Choice Aggregation? The short answer is: public power light. For a longer answer, check out this Web site to learn more about the city’s latest renewable energy policy proposal.

Don’t let PG&E kill CCA

-
0

EDITORIAL For decades, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. has been a deceptive and corrupting influence in San Francisco politics, time and again subverting efforts to create a public power system that would save city ratepayers tens of millions of dollars annually, comply with the federal Raker Act public power mandate, and create a greener power portfolio.

PG&E is prohibited by state law from interfering with community choice aggregation, an eminently worthy project that will allow San Francisco to develop sustainable energy projects and to buy and distribute power on behalf of residents. So, to circumvent the law, PG&E works quietly and aggressively through the Chamber of Commerce, the mainstream media, and community groups. It also spreads a blizzard of greenwashing ads around the cityscape.

The Guardian obtained a memo that PG&E secretly distributed to various community groups around town a few weeks ago, calling the CCA plan flawed and the city unfit to enter the power business. As Amanda Witherell reported on our Politics blog, Committee on Jobs director Nathan Nayman then plagiarized whole chunks of the PG&E missive for a May 23 guest editorial that he wrote for the San Francisco Examiner (a PG&E ad nestled close to his op-ed on the Examiner‘s Web site).

Then the Chamber of Commerce got into the act, purporting to conduct a poll of 111 business executives, most of whom said — surprise, surprise — that they would rather just keep doing business with PG&E. We got a copy of the poll, and it showed that only l,500 of the city’s 50,000 or so businesses were canvassed, and less than 10 per cent bothered to respond. The company that conducted the poll, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, lists PG&E as a client on its Web page but does not list the chamber.

Despite the obvious bias of this survey and the chamber’s clear intention to do PG&E’s bidding, both the Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle dutifully reported the results but didn’t include any comment from public power people. How close was the coordination between PG&E and the chamber? When the Chronicle called PG&E for comment, the reporter wrote, a chamber spokesperson called back on PG&E’s behalf. Neat. And the chamber’s James Lazarus testified on the poll results at the Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Finance Committee CCA hearing June 6.

To its credit, the committee saw through the charade and voted unanimously to move CCA forward. The full board was scheduled to consider approving CCA on June 12 after our press time, and approval appeared likely. CCA is an important first step toward public power, consumer choice, and an energy policy that is sustainable and independent. Let’s put CCA on the fast track and keep exposing PG&E’s sneaky maneuvers and the people and businesses that promote them. *

The fate of District 4

-
0

EDITORIAL Sup. Ed Jew may be able to explain the $40,000 cash in his safe to federal prosecutors. He may be able to convince the authorities that he did nothing illegal when he personally took payment for work that a permit expediter did and kept half the money for so-far-undefined community improvements. Those are criminal issues and a matter for the feds, Jew’s lawyer, and possibly a judge and jury. And while we agree with Sup. Chris Daly — it sure looks terrible — Jew is innocent until proven guilty.

His residence is something else.

The daily papers have produced enough evidence over the past few weeks to raise real doubts about whether Jew actually lives at the address he listed on his voter registration and candidacy forms. By law, he had to be a resident of the district 30 days before he filed for supervisor, but the water service at his 28th Avenue house had been turned off for four months before he announced his candidacy. Current water records show very little use. Neighbors have said the house has been vacant for some time.

So either Jew comes and goes at very odd hours, never sees his neighbors, and doesn’t shower or wash dishes at home, or he’s got a real problem. City Attorney Dennis Herrera has asked Jew to submit proof by June 8 that he is a resident of District 4, but there’s no reason the supervisor should wait for that deadline. He needs to immediately make public his home address and provide evidence to the voters of his district that he’s actually a resident. And if he can’t do that, then he ought to save the city and the district a long legal battle and simply step down.

Under the City Charter, the mayor has the authority to fill a vacancy on the Board of Supervisors, although the person appointed has to face the voters at the next regularly scheduled election. If Jew leaves office soon, it’s likely that both Gavin Newsom and his appointee will be on the November ballot.

And right now, the odds are that Newsom will appoint the man he endorsed and campaigned for last November — Doug Chan. That would be a mistake. As we reported in "PG&E’s Candidates" (10/25/06), Chan is an attorney for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. His firm, Chan, Doi, and Leal, received more than $200,000 in legal fees from PG&E in 2005 and 2006, and as a partner, Chan received at least $10,000 of that (according to his own disclosure forms). If Newsom appointed him, Chan would be the first supervisor in modern history who directly received income from PG&E. At a time when the city is moving toward a public power system and is already involved in millions of dollars’ worth of litigation with PG&E, that would be an unacceptable conflict.

Besides, the voters have already had something to say on the question. Chan finished fourth in the balloting last fall, behind Jew, Ron Dudum, and Jaynry Mak. Dudum, who is far too conservative for our taste, was the first runner-up — but there were four Asian candidates in the race, and together they far outpolled him. So there’s a good case for appointing an Asian to this seat.

We endorsed Mak in the race, and we still think she would be the best of the candidates who ran in 2006 — and if the mayor wants to go beyond that field and find someone new, he’ll have to make a strong case for defying the will of the voters. 2

Public power, underground

-
0

› amanda@sfbg.com

Public power advocates are looking for new ways to lay the groundwork for city-owned electricity — by just opening up the ground.

The plan could be a significant step forward for the public power movement and may open a new front in the long campaign to replace Pacific Gas and Electric Co. with a city-run agency.

Sup. Chris Daly has asked the city attorney to draft legislation that would require anyone who digs up a city street, for any reason, to install city-owned power and fiber-optic cables in the hole. That would mean, for example, that when PG&E replaces natural gas lines, as it’s doing all over the city right now, the company would also have to install (or allow the city to install) the infrastructure for a municipal power and communications system.

And since the city will be paying to tear up every single street to replace water and sewer pipes over the next two decades, the plan would eventually create a complete network that could be used to deliver public electricity — and Internet and cable TV — to residents and businesses.

"In 15 to 20 years’ time, we would have an electric grid that’s underground and owned by the city," Daly told the Guardian.

The advantage of the plan is that it may be far cheaper (and more practical) to build an underground city network than to condemn and buy out PG&E’s existing, aging system.

The idea isn’t new: Back in 2004, Sup. Tom Ammiano proposed a similar plan and held hearings on it. Ammiano talked about burying electrical cable as well as fiber-optic lines, which he said would be a far better solution to the digital divide than Mayor Gavin Newsom’s wi-fi plan.

Daly’s idea is to use a special tax program to purchase the equipment at bulk prices and have it on hand for whenever the jackhammers come out.

"The beauty of this proposal is you’re getting the efficiency of the streets being dug up," Daly said, which would reduce costs for the overall plan.

And of course, the final system would be all underground — much more aesthetically pleasing and safer during earthquakes than PG&E’s aboveground grid.

The cable itself isn’t cheap, but Daly suggests the city could take advantage of the Mello-Roos Community Facilities Act of 1982, passed by voters in response to the belt-tightening implications of Proposition 13. With Mello-Roos, local officials designate an area — from as small as a house lot to as large as an entire city — as a community facilities district and levy a tax to pay for improvements to the infrastructure in that area. Similar to a "community benefit district," it must be approved by the property owners, and the funds typically go toward better streets, services, and facilities — including electricity.

It costs the city as much as $380 a foot to dig trenches, then backfill them after installing conduit. But if the street is already torn up, the price of laying electric cable is only about $100 a foot, figures we’ve obtained show. The cost for wiring all 900-odd miles of San Francisco streets would run close to $500 million — less than half of what PG&E insists the city would have to pay to buy out its old lines. And individual neighborhoods could be wired for relatively modest amounts of money.

Daly said CFDs could be established by neighborhood or district and coupled with the installation of renewable energy sources, which the city is planning to do through community choice aggregation. For example, residents in Bernal Heights could decide to add a 2 percent property tax to their bills to buy the power lines, the Public Utilities Commission could put a solar array on the nearby reservoir — and a percentage of that neighborhood’s power would be locally owned and operated and cleaner than putting up a peaker plant on Potrero Hill.

"We’re undergoing a dramatic expansion of our renewables in the city," PUC spokesperson Tony Winnicker said. "If we could move our renewables through our own distribution system, there would be enormous cost savings for our ratepayers."

The Department of Public Works would coordinate the work. "We’ve been running the Street Construction Coordination Center for as long as I’ve been here," said spokesperson Christine Falvey, who’s been with the DPW for more 10 years. The center manages the permits for digging up the rights-of-way and tracks construction projects five years into the future to make sure streets aren’t continually wracked with potholes.

A fiber optics feasibility study prepared for the city by Columbia Telecommunications Corp. and released this past January also recommended that the city take advantage of open holes in the roads. "Opportunities for cost-effective installation of fiber arise each day as City crews work in the right of way. At a minimum, San Francisco should immediately adopt a future-looking policy to add to existing fiber and conduit infrastructure at every opportunity to build up critical mass," the report reads.

About half of PG&E’s lines are already underground, and the company is slowly moving to comply with state mandates that call for more buried cables. But the city’s Utility Undergrounding Task Force reported that at PG&E’s current rate, undergrounding the remaining 470 miles of wires would take 50 years.

San Francisco activists have tried repeatedly to take over PG&E’s system and enforce the federal Raker Act, which requires the city to operate a public power system. But every attempt has required a citywide vote to create a new power agency and to authorize the sale of bonds to buy out the utility’s system — and every time that’s gone on the ballot, PG&E has spent millions to defeat it.

The Daly plan would also require a ballot fight — but perhaps not an expensive citywide campaign. The Mello-Roos taxes could be approved neighborhood by neighborhood. The price would most likely be in the millions, not the hundreds of millions it would cost to buy PG&E’s entire system at once. *

A new route to public power

-
0

EDITORIAL Public power isn’t a hard sell in principle. For starters, public electric utilities in California offer consistently lower rates than private companies, and in many cases, the rates are far lower. Municipal utilities are more likely to be environmentally responsible and seek better conservation measures and renewable energy sources. San Francisco’s under the thumb of Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which has soaring rates, is plagued by reliability problems, and operates a nuclear power plant.

Besides, this is the only city in the nation that has a federal mandate, the Raker Act, requiring public power.

But the politics are tough: cities that want to go into the power business traditionally buy out the private company’s existing wires, polls, and meters — but that costs a big chunk of money. And any bond act to buy out PG&E’s system requires a citywide vote — which means fighting PG&E’s tens of millions of dollars in campaign cash. Over and over again since the 1930s, the company has defeated citywide bond acts with the pure power of money.

But now Sup. Chris Daly has an approach that might change the calculus.

As Amanda Witherell reports ("Public Power, Underground," page 13), every street in San Francisco is going to be torn up in the next few years, either by PG&E, which is replacing gas lines, or by the city, which is replacing water and sewer lines. Daly wants to require everyone who digs a ditch in a San Francisco street to allow the city to run electric wire and fiber-optic cable at the same time. Since the main cost of burying power lines is the excavation, the city would be able, over the course of 15 years or so, to create a cost-effective, safe, and modern underground utility system. Then there would be no need to buy out PG&E; city officials could simply start selling power on the public lines.

It’s not that simple, of course: the wire itself isn’t cheap — and Daly is looking at a finance system that would require property owners to vote to tax themselves to pay for it. And it’s going to take a long time to complete.

But the system could be built one neighborhood at a time and could be connected to new solar generating systems that the city is planning to construct anyway. So the residents of, say, Bernal Heights or the Haight or the Mission or Bayview could agree to pay for a local city-run electric project. The solar panels would generate power (cheaply), the city-owned lines would carry them, and the savings in energy costs would more than compensate for the modest tax increase.

The city’s Public Utilities Commission has only begun to look into the idea, but staffers there say it’s entirely feasible.

This proposal needs to move forward with all possible dispatch. The supervisors should authorize money for a full-scale feasibility study to look at the costs, the schedule, and the ways neighborhood-based public power projects can be started as soon as possible. The board should approve Daly’s legislation, and the mayor should sign it.

And the public power movement ought to get behind this plan. It’s not an instant answer — but then, neither is buying out PG&E’s system; the litigation alone might take a decade. And if San Francisco can create green public power in even one district, the idea is going to spread. *

Bringing CCA to life

-
0

EDITORIAL Community Choice Aggregation, a new system of developing and selling electric power, has the potential to put San Francisco on the cutting edge of renewable energy nationwide. It could offer lower rates to consumers. It could be an important first step on the road to a full public power system.

When the notion first came up a few years ago, everyone — from Mayor Gavin Newsom to the supervisors to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to Pacific Gas and Electric Co. — claimed to be supportive. Now Supervisors Ross Mirkarimi and Tom Ammiano have put forward a plan that would ensure that half the city’s electricity come from solar, wind, and increased efficiency (along with the power we currently get from the dam at Hetch Hetchy). The plan would put San Francisco in the business of developing, promoting, and using solar energy on a huge scale. And suddenly, PG&E is spending millions on ad campaigns and has launched a quiet letter-writing effort to sabotage CCA — and the mayor is nowhere to be found.

It’s no coincidence that the giant private utility’s ads began appearing all over the city, including on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, in the same month that Ammiano and Mirkarimi were preparing to introduce their CCA bill. The company is trying to lay the groundwork to counter the city’s arguments that public power, or CCA, is an environmentally sound alternative to PG&E. As Amanda Witherell reported ("Green Isn’t PG&E," 4/18/07), the whole image of PG&E as a green company is a lie: its current power profile is 44 percent fossil fuels and 24 percent nuclear — which means two-thirds of the electricity the company sells is creating either greenhouse gases or nuclear waste.

The CCA plan, on the other hand, calls for 360 megawatts of fully renewable energy in San Francisco. The way the system would work, the city would use money that voters have already approved to develop solar generators and would contract with electricity providers that offer renewable energy. The city would buy the power in bulk, at comparatively low rates, then resell it to residents and businesses. And since the city won’t be making a profit, the cost to consumers will be less than what they currently pay PG&E.

It sounds simple, but the actual implementation is going to be a bit tricky — and will require constant monitoring. That’s why Ammiano and Mirkarimi want to create a new panel, made of several supervisors and representatives from the Mayor’s Office and the SFPUC, to manage the transition. It makes perfect sense: the supervisors need to play a role in the new agency and ought to sign off on any contract. If they don’t, the whole thing could be underfunded, delayed, and packed off to a bureaucratic back room.

But Newsom doesn’t want to give up control, and City Attorney Dennis Herrera hasn’t signed off on the deal. Herrera no doubt has legal arguments against creating a joint control agency, but we can’t believe there’s no legal way to pull this off. Herrera needs to help the board come up with a creative solution.

Meanwhile, Newsom needs to stop ducking this issue. He seems to have plenty of time to attend PG&E’s faux-green media events — but even after CCA supporters rescheduled a press conference twice at the request of Newsom’s office and set it for a time the mayor was available, he didn’t show up.

CCA is a key part of the city’s energy future. The supervisors should pass the plan, including an oversight panel, and the mayor should not only sign it but actively push for rapid implementation. If not, his kowtowing to PG&E should be a central issue for a challenger in the fall campaign. *

PS State law bars PG&E from actively campaigning against aggregation, yet there are signs that the utility is doing just that. Herrera and District Attorney Kamala Harris should immediately open an investigation.

And now Matier and Ross do a little flacking for PG&E and lots of shorting of public power

-
0

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

A real Earth Week question: What would happen if a Hearst staffer sent up a question to Hearst corporate: Why are we forced to lie for PG&E?

-
0

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Well, there it was, in the same bottom right hand corner of the Chronicle front page where the PG&E ad had been two days before, a story headlined “Green guardians go extra mile to save planet.”

The April 20 story, by Chronicle/Hearst environmental writer Jane Kay, reported that Maya Butterfield, the mother of fourchildren, “drives as little as possible while she waits for a car company to sell a hybrid minivan.”

The story reported that The Rev. Sally Bingham “tells her Grace Cathedral congregants that it’s an insult to the Creator if they don’t take care of the earth.”

The story reported that UC Berkeley student Sam Aarons “lobbied to move the campus toward energy efficiency.”

The story reported that lawyer turned-teacher Will Parish “installed solar panels on his roof and double panes on his windows. He takes short showers, takes his own bags to the store, and eschews bottled water in favor of good old Hetch Hetchy brew.”

Hetch Hetchy brew? What about Hetch Hetchy public power? Imagine, Jane Kay, who has been around the park a time or two, got the term Hetch Hetchy on the Chronicle front page in a story extolling the folks going an extra mile and taking lesser showers to help save the planet. Incredible.

She, and all the others on the Chronicle/Hearst green team, slaving away on green this and green that for Earth Day and the paper’s green coverage, did not mention the real green story: that there is such a thing as Hetch Hetchy public power and that PG&E has an illegal private utility in San Francisco that has been polluting the city, corrupting City Hall, corrupting the Hearst papers for decades, and keeping green public power out of the city. More: that PG&E muscled City Hall and stopped the city from sending its own cheap Hetch Hetchy public power to the city’s own residents and businesses as federal law required. (The federal Raker Act and a U.S. Supreme Court decision mandated that San Francisco must be a public power city, the only city so mandated in the U.S., because it got an unprecedented concession to dam a beautiful valley (Hetch Hetchy) inside a national park (Yosemite) for the city’s water and power supply.

We got the water, but PG@E kept us from getting our own cheap public power and instead PG&E forced the city to buy its expensive private power and decades of anti-green, pro-nuclear and fossil-burning private power. See many Guardian stories since l969).

Get the picture? The Chronicle/Hearst sprinkled friendly references to PG&E throughout their coverage while never mentioning the city’s public power mandates or movements nor any mention of the major Ammiano/Mirkarimi press conference and legislation for a real greening movement, which is community choice aggregation, the first step toward public power.

David R. Baker, who wrote so glowingly about PG@E’s $l0 million victory over public power in Sacramento, noted in his April 20 green piece that “PG&E, for example, offers free energy audits, which look at a shop or office’s total energy use and suggest steps to cut it.”

There were references to the variety of PG&E’s “energy saving resources, including a home energy analyzer,” with a helpful online reference, and the “many programs to help lower electricity use,” again with a helpful online reference. There was even, God save us all, a special top of the page shaded box on page 22 of the April 20 Green special supplement, titled “PG&E’s emissions reduction program.” The end paragraph: “Several other utilities also offer customers ways to help the environment. For more information on programs offered, contact your local utility.” Nobody wanted a byline on this blast of nonsense, so the tag just read “Chronicle staff.”

Get the picture? Repeating for clarity and emphasis: Hearst, as it has for decades, once again polluted its news columns on behalf of PG@E and blacked out any reference to public power, the city’s public power mandates, community choice aggregation, or any of the greening and financial benefits that would flow from a public power city.

Note: this is Hearst corporate policy and I do not blame reporters or editors who are forced to carry on this charade. I just wonder if sometime, somewhere, on some story like this, what would happen if a reporter or editor would send the question upstairs, why are we forced to lie for PG@E?

In any event, I am going to email the questions to Hearst corporate in New York, directly, and via their local executives Publisher Frank Vega and Editor Phil Bronstein. Why can’t Hearst tell the truth about PG@E? Why is Hearst damaging its credility and embarrassing its staff by continuing to coddle PG&E and censor public power?

Bruce B. Brugmann, looking out today from my office window at the bottom of Potrero Hill and seeing the poisonous fumes wafting up and toward the city from the Mirant private power plant, courtesy of PG&E, Hearst, and PG&E-friendly stories purporting to be Earth Day coverage

Extra! Extra! PG&E buys the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. The shame of Hearst. Why people get mad at the media (l9)

-
0

By Bruce B. Brugmann

And so Hearst, after decades of shamefully operating as a PG&E shill and shamefully censoring the PG&E/Raker
Act scandal out of its papers (both in its old Examiner and its new Chronicle), ran a large cheery PG&E ad in the right hand corner of the front page of yesterday’s April l8 Chronicle.

The ad ran without the usual identification “advertisement,” even though it was a pure political ad and part of PG&E’s phony “let’s green the city” campaign. The ad, spiffy and lime-colored,
was classic PG&E greenwashing: “Green is giving your roof a day job. To sign up for PG&E’s solar classes, visit Let’sgreenthiscity.com.”

In a classic of self-immolation, publisher Frank Vega sought to justify the front page ad with a short publishers’ statement on page two. He wrote, “Today, the Chronicle begins publishing front page ads. Our advertisers recognize the value of the Chronicle brand, our audience and the priority of delivering key messages to you, our reader. In the recent past, newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and USA Today have all announced their willingness to accept advertising in prominent positions.

“The Chronicle is committed to delivering you important news, information and advertising in a variety of new and engaging ways.”

Vega hasn’t been around long, and he may not know the history of Hearst’s obeisance to PG&E and so he may not realize that he was selling the front page to the utility that has created the biggest scandal in American history involving a city. But couldn’t someone over at 5th and Mission fill him in?

Meanwhile, over at City Hall, Hearst’s greenwashing for PG&E barreled along as usual. While Hearst allowed PG&E to take over the front page, the Chronicle was pitching in for PG&E on the news side by blowing off a major press conference and story by Sups. Tom Ammiano and Ross Mirkarimi on their introduction of their community choice aggregation plan. This is a major step toward public power that involves the city buying environmentally sound energy in bulk and selling it to the public at lower prices than what PG&E charges, which PG&E hates. Wyatt Buchanan, obviously new to the issue, buried the news in three dopey lines at the bottom of a supervisors’ roundup story. And he didn’t get the public power point, didn’t explain the plan properly, and didn’t even use the correct name the plan is known by “community choice aggregation.” And then Buchanan reports without blushing, “The plan faces a series of major hurdles before it came be implemented,” not mentioning that the major hurdle is that good ole greenwasher perched on the front page of his paper and spending millions on its greenwashing campaign. Doesn’t anybody over there fill in the virgin reporters about the PG&E crocodiles in the back bays of City Hall?

Let me start with but one point: The Guardian and I have for years documented how Hearst reversed its policy of supporting the building of the Hetch Hetchy dam and public power and has censored its news and editorials on behalf of PG&E since the late l920s. The reason has perhaps been best explained in the book “The Chief:The Life and Times of William Randolph Hearst” by David Nasaw, who is the chair of the doctoral history program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Nasaw writes in his book, published in 2000, that Hearst and his old Examiner, the Hearst flagship paper, were for 40 years promoting “full municipal ownership and control of Hetch Hetchy water and power.” Hearst was opposed by the “business and banking communities, led by (Herbert) Fleishhacker, a board member of several of the bank and power trusts, who hoped to be able to privatize at least some of the Hetch Hetchy resources.” Fleishhacker was also the president of the London and Paris National Bank of San Francisco and Hearst’s chief source of funds on the West Coast.

Thus, Nasaw writes, “the basis for a Hearst-Fleishhacker alliance was obvious. Hearst needed Fleishhacker to sell his bonds, while the banker needed the Hearst newspaper to promote his (privatization) plans for Hetch Hetchy.”
Nasaw outlines the secret deal: Hearst got desperately needed cash. Fleshhacker and PG&E got a Hearst reversal of policy to support PG&E and oppose Hetch Hetchy public power–a policy that has lasted up to yesterday when Hearst sold its front page to PG&E (much too cheaply) and then stomped down an anti-PG&E, public power news story inside.

“No longer would the Hearst papers take an unequivocal stand for municipal ownership,” Nasaw writes, based on Hearst correspondence with John Francis Neylan, his West Coast lieutenant and publisher of the Examiner. “No longer would they employ the language and images that had been their stock in trade.”

And so PG&E bought Hearst in the mid-l920s and Hearst has stayed bought up to this very day. Through the years, as we have developed this theme story, I have asked every local Hearst publisher and many reporters and editors why their pro-PG&E/anti-public power campaign continues on, much to the damage of the paper’s credibility and much to the embarrassment of its staff. Nobody can explain. If anybody can, let me know.
Believe me, there will be much more to come on this issue, in the Guardian and in the Bruce blog.

Postscript: Awhile back, during the latest public power initiative in 2002, Susan Sward and Chuck Finnie did a splendid story on the scandal. But it was a quickie affair and the two reporters and their story were snuffed out, not to be heard from again.

Bruce B. Brugmann, who sees the poisonous fumes of the Mirant Power plant from my office window at the bottom of Potrero Hill, courtesy of PG&E, Hearst, and the San Francisco Chronicle and its greenwashing for PG@E campaigns B3

pg&e.jpg

Now the Chron front page really IS a PG&E ad

-
0

By Tim Redmond

We’ve often accused the San Francisco Chronicle of acting like a public-relations mouthpiece for Pacific Gas and Electric Company. But it’s not even funny anymore: The Chron today has a big front-page ad from PG&E — and, perhaps not coincidentally, the paper almost totally ignored the news about a key step toward public power.

The front-page ad, accompanied by a note from the publisher, has turned some heads among local journalists. Publisher Frank Vega says in his note that the Chron is just following everyone else in the industry.

But PG&E’s greenwashing ads? Right on the front page? And where was the story about Community Choice Aggregation?

IT’S CCA TIME!

-
0

By Amanda Witherell

Ever since the California State Assembly passed AB 117 in 2002 legalizing “Community Choice Aggregation” (CCA) public power advocates have been eagerly awaiting the day San Francisco would get the legislative ball rolling and start divorce proceedings with it’s current electricity provider, Pacific Gas and Electric.

That ball got a big push from Sups. Tom Ammiano and Ross Mirkarimi on Tuesday April 17, when they introduced a draft implementation plan for CCA to their fellow board members. The plan calls for the city to purchase and provide 51 percent of its energy from renewables by 2017.

“It’s wonderful considering the response to global warming from PG&E has been fossil fuel, ‘clean’ coal, and nuclear power,” Mirkarimi told the Guardian.

Read how CCA will make San Francisco 50 percent greener, after the jump…

Green isn’t PG&E

-
0

› amanda@sfbg.com

You’ve seen the ads, lime colored and screaming from the sides of Muni buses, papered to the walls of BART stations, popping up on local news Web sites. "Let’s green this city," they proclaim in a chummy, we’re-all-in-this-together way. Like any good ad campaign, these broadsides, brought to you by Pacific Gas and Electric Co., are designed to snap your eco-consciousness into thinking, "Hell yeah! I’m going to get right on that!"

And like any good greenwashing campaign, they are also designed to distract you from what’s really going on at the $12.5 billion utility company.

"There’s an advertising rule that’s based on the idea to advertise where you’re weakest," says Sheldon Rampton, cofounder of the Center for Media and Democracy, which regularly tracks corporate greenwashing. "What typically happens with greenwashing is an attempt to create a superficial image without changing anything the company’s doing that would affect their bottom line."

Yes, PG&E has the fourth largest alternative fuel fleet of any utility in the country. (That’s if you define natural gas as an alternative fuel, a resource in which this utility happens to have $9 billion already invested. It’s still a fossil fuel and only burns 30 percent cleaner than oil and coal.)

Yes, PG&E is making environmental strides with increased investments in solar, biogas, and wind energy. (But the company will, by its own admission, fail to make the state-mandated goal of selling 20 percent renewables by 2010.)

Yes, PG&E has committed $1 billion over the past three years to energy-efficiency programs. (Actually, that money isn’t a kindhearted gift from the shareholders. It’s mandated by state law. And much of it comes from the ratepayers — see the "Public Goods Charge" on your monthly bill.)

Yes, PG&E has been donating solar panels to local schools and nonprofits. (Less than 1 percent of PG&E’s power comes from solar energy.)

Yes, the folks at PG&E have been loudly announcing all their good deeds. Here’s what else they’ve been working on, a little more quietly.

GREEN IS NOT A SUPERHERO


A recent PG&E television commercial shows children playing with Renewable Energy Man and chanting, "Sun, water, wind" as the future sources of power. But consider:

• PG&E’s current power profile is 44 percent fossil fuels, 24 percent nuclear, 20 percent large hydro, and only 12 percent renewable.

• As of 2006, PG&E had planned to integrate 300 megawatts of renewable energy sources a year into its overall profile in an effort to make the state-mandated goal of 20 percent renewables by 2010.

• In 2006 Securities and Exchange Commission filings, PG&E projected it would miss that goal by a couple percentage points and is relying on the "flexible compliance" that the law allows.

• The utility is currently building 1,350 megawatts of fossil fuel–burning plants, which are permitted to emit up to 1,100 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour.

In December 2006, PG&E filed permit applications with the California Pubic Utilities Commission for 2,300 megawatts of conventional, nonrenewable power sources.

Renewable Energy Man is looking pretty weak.

GREEN ISN’T NATURAL GAS


PG&E is working to secure permission to build an $850 million, 232-mile gas pipeline, called the Pacific Connector, to bring one billion cubic feet of natural gas a day from Oregon into PG&E’s California customer territory starting in 2011. Some facts about natural gas:

• PG&E customers currently use 836 billion cubic feet of natural gas per year, or 2.3 billion cubic feet per day. Over the past 20 years, natural gas usage in California has increased in concert with the rise in population — about 1 to 2 percent per year. The new pipeline would increase daily supply by 50 percent.

• Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is considered the cleanest of the fossil fuels, but it’s still a hazardous, flammable material and can freeze-burn skin, crack ship decks, and asphyxiate.

• A "small" LNG tanker is the length of three football fields and burns 170 metric tons of fuel (natural gas and heavy-duty diesel) per day. Planners anticipate at least six to seven ships will dock per month at a new LNG terminal in Coos Bay, Ore.

PG&E recently showcased a hybrid natural gas–electricity plug-in Toyota Prius with V2G, or vehicle to grid, technology. Unlike those of other electric cars, the connection is two-way — power comes from the grid to the car, but power can also go from the car to the grid. PG&E has said that if enough people own these cars, each one will be a miniature storage unit of power for the utility to draw on during peak hours — eliminating the need for more power plants. If the utility takes too much electricity from your battery while you work or sleep, you can still run the car on natural gas. But either way, you’re paying PG&E for the electricity and the fuel, and since PG&E electricity is hardly renewable, it isn’t doing much for the ecosystem.

GREEN IS NOT A NUKE


Twenty-four percent of PG&E’s so-called nonemissions burning power comes from nuclear plants in Humboldt Bay and Diablo Canyon. When asked if PG&E is considering future nuclear power plants, spokesperson Keely Wachs said, "We’re not ruling it out." Some reasons to worry:

• One of PG&E’s newest board members is Richard Meserve, former chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

• The decommissioning of nuclear power facilities is set to begin at the Humboldt Bay plant in 2009 and at the Diablo Canyon plant in 2024, at a cost of $2.1 billion, or more than $5 billion in future dollars — all of which you will pay.

• PG&E will undergo a $16 million study of the feasibility of relicensing Diablo Canyon (at your expense).

• PG&E currently has contracts out for $539 million of nuclear fuel, which you will pay for.

And, of course, PG&E spends millions fighting public power (which is almost always more environmentally sound than PG&E’s private mix). Green city or greenwashing? It seems pretty clear to us. *

Reilly’s right to sue

-
0

EDITORIAL One of the more effective ways the courts have kept activists out in the legal cold over the years is to deny them what’s known as "standing" — the right to sue. You want to fight the government in court over the destruction of a wilderness area? First you have to prove that you’ll be damaged by the logging or mining or development — and until relatively recently, unless you personally owned land or a business in the immediate vicinity, you were out of luck. You want to sue to force San Francisco to abide by federal law and create a public power system? No can do: individual citizens have no standing to sue over violations of the Raker Act. Only the secretary of the interior or the city attorney can do that — and neither one has been willing to do so in half a century.

Some of the most important advances in public-interest law have been expansions of the right of standing — the right of individuals to sue over major political issues when the government agencies that are supposed to be watchdogs have failed to do their jobs. But now the two big newspaper chains that dominate the Bay Area want to deny that right to real estate investor Clint Reilly.

In filings March 16, the Hearst Corp. and MediaNews Group sought to get Reilly’s suit against the monopolization of the local newspaper market thrown out of court. The grounds? Reilly is, well, just a citizen. Just a reader of the papers and someone who buys ads in them. Just someone who will suffer the untold damage of losing diversity in media voices in the community. Someone who, the monopolist lawyers say, has no standing to sue.

The problem, of course, is that the government agencies that clearly have standing to try to block two publishing barons from conspiring to end newspaper competition in the Bay Area — the attorneys general of the United States and California — have refused to do anything except smile and look the other way while Hearst and MediaNews go about their diabolical business. So if an individual like Reilly has no right to go to court, then there will be no legal obstacle to the barons’ plans.

The obvious legal answer, of course, is that the judge in the case, Susan Illston, must toss out this specious argument, allow the suit to continue, and get to the serious legal issues at stake.

The case is obvious: the people who will be injured most by the elimination of newspaper competition are the readers, the citizens, the political activists … the public. And if a member of the public can’t sue to stop it, there’s not a lot of hope for justice.

In fact, as Joe Alioto, the attorney for Reilly, points out, the Sherman and Clayton antitrust laws were specifically written to allow individuals to sue over monopolistic practices, "because the authors of those laws didn’t trust the government to control monopolies."

But the real message here is that the new California AG, Jerry Brown, can’t simply follow in his predecessor’s lead and ignore the clear antitrust implications of the MediaNews and Hearst deals. Is Reilly the only one who will stand up against the publishing barons? Where are you, Jerry? *


PS Where is the US attorney’s office, which was so quick to put Josh Wolf in jail, when the real lawbreakers in the publishing business are making millions by eliminating competition?

PPS The San Francisco Chronicle‘s story on the filing, by Bob Egelko, didn’t quote Reilly or Alioto in response. And Reilly’s legal response is under court seal — thanks to Hearst and MediaNews, which have demanded that all documents remain secret. If the media barons don’t justify that secrecy to the court by March 28, the records will be opened. If not, we will continue our so-far-successful court battle to open the records.

The giant extension-cord plan

-
0

EDITORIAL It’s only because of a dark moment in San Francisco’s history that city officials are trying to figure out what to do about an underwater electricity cable that’s slated to run from Pittsburg onto port property and provide additional power for the tip of the Peninsula.

San Francisco was supposed to have its own power cable, carrying its own power over the bay from the hydroelectric dam at Hetch Hetchy. In fact, in the 1920s the city built 99 miles of cable, from the high Sierra to the South Bay … and mysteriously ran out of copper wire a few yards from a new Pacific Gas and Electric Co. substation in Newark.

That was a key moment in the Raker Act scandal, the ongoing violation of federal law that has allowed PG&E to operate a monopoly private power agency in a city that’s supposed to have public power.

But now PG&E controls all the power coming into town — and the California Independent System Operator, which is responsible for the state grid, says the supply coming into San Francisco is too limited and not sufficiently reliable.

As JB Powell reports in "Power Play" on page TK, Babcock and Brown, an international financial firm based in Australia, has put up $300 million for a Trans Bay Cable that would link the city to the East Bay. Ironically, a public power agency — in Pittsburg — would wind up making money off the project by selling power in San Francisco. Other than rent at the port, this city will get nothing out of the deal.

There are some basic conceptual problems with the project. Most of the power shipped along the 57-mile, 400-megawatt line would be produced by fossil fuel plants. That’s contrary to the direction the city is trying to go: San Francisco is in the process of building solar projects and is looking into using tidal energy. The Hetch Hetchy project, of course, is hydropower. And critics say that the new line would flood San Francisco with an oversupply of electricity, discouraging the environmentally sound approach of conservation.

But there’s a larger problem here: a private venture firm will own the cable — and could sell it to another entity, perhaps PG&E. So the city’s energy future under this scenario will still be tied to unaccountable private interests.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, whose Local Agency Formation Commission held a hearing on the cable plan in January, asked San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) staffers why the city doesn’t have its own line. The agency, staffer Barbara Hale said, has been looking into that — but any project would be years away.

Still, this line, if the city goes along with the deal, will be with us for decades — and the Board of Supervisors shouldn’t just approve it without looking at its role in a long-term municipal energy program. San Francisco is moving inexorably toward public power — too slowly, but inexorably. How, exactly, does this cable fit into a municipal power system? Does San Francisco even need it? Is a publicly owned transbay power line something that ought to be on the agenda? Why would the city want to go along with this private venture if there is (or ought to be) a city project in the wings?

Nobody has answered those questions, because the city still lacks a detailed public power plan. Before the supervisors approve this cable, the SFPUC needs to look at all the energy options, prepare a long-term plan, and evaluate whether this giant extension cord fits into it. *

Power play

-
0

› news@sfbg.com

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors will soon decide the fate of the Trans Bay Cable (TBC), a privately financed, underwater power line that would plug the city’s electric grid into power plants in the East Bay.

Backers call the cable the best way to avoid blackouts, like those the city saw in the wake of the energy deregulation debacle of the late 1990s. But green power activists argue that the developer of this 57-mile extension cord is cashing in on California’s blackout fears and that approving the project would go against the city’s commitment to finding sustainable sources of energy.

Australian financial firm Babcock and Brown has staked $300 million on the cable’s construction and offered more than $28 million for a community benefits package if the project is approved. The developer plans to profit on its investment with a guaranteed 13.5 percent rate of return, granted to it by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for the sale of power running through the cable. Power plants in and around Pittsburg would generate most of the juice going though the 400-megawatt-capacity line. Ratepayers across the state would foot the bill.

The California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO), the public benefit corporation in charge of the state’s electric grid, has asked for San Francisco supervisors to approve the cable as soon as possible so that it can begin service by 2010. Cal-ISO’s sole mission is to keep the lights on, and when there isn’t enough power in the system, it coordinates the dreaded rolling blackouts that most Californians remember from the energy crisis. CAL-ISO representative Larry Tobias brought up those dark days at a San Francisco Port Commission meeting Feb. 27. "Without the Trans Bay Cable project," he warned, "we will be back in that situation again." Electricity from the TBC, Tobias told commissioners, will give the city’s system the "reliability" to prevent blackouts.

Tobias said if supervisors reject the cable project, CAL-ISO will have to seek alternative proposals. At a January meeting of the city’s Local Agency Formation Committee (LAFCo), Tobias brought up a plan previously put forward by Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which looked to bring power across the bay from a substation in Moraga. In 2005, PG&E asked for more time to finish its design. CAL-ISO rejected its request and chose the TBC instead.

But some local activists say the city does not need the cable, or any other privately funded power line. Steven J. Moss of San Francisco Community Power told the Guardian a 400-megawatt cable would flood the power grid with "an enormous oversupply" of electricity. "That would be a waste of resources," he said. Moss claims CAL-ISO is understandably obsessed with reliability but the probability of its doomsday blackout scenarios is incredibly small. How small? At the Port Commission’s March 13 meeting, Moss said his calculations indicate there is only a "0.0002 percent chance that the [TBC] will be needed."

Even in the worst-case scenario, Moss told us, the city is only "looking at a 50- to 60-megawatt gap [in energy supplies] 10 years from now." His figures, he said, are based on Cal-ISO’s own estimates, adding, "The real way to plug that gap [is] demand management — solar, wind, all the things that San Francisco talks about constantly and that are good for us."

At the January LAFCo hearing, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi questioned officials from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) about the city’s plans to acquire its own power line from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir’s hydroelectric stations. The city already owns most of the 200-mile transmission route from the Yosemite power stations, but PG&E possesses the last 30 miles and charges the city fees to bring electricity up the Peninsula from Newark. "Why can’t we have our own cable?" Mirkarimi asked SFPUC staffer Barbara Hale. She said the agency has been "studying the feasibility" of the proposed city-owned line but cannot yet commit to a firm "coming online date" like the TBC’s developer can.

For years the city has been seeking a way to secure full ownership of the Hetch Hetchy lines as a step toward forming a public power utility, independent of PG&E control. Ironically, if the TBC is built, a public power agency would own the cable and profit from it, just not San Francisco’s power agency. Pittsburg’s municipal utility is slated to take over the line once Babcock and Brown finishes its construction.

At the same hearing in January, Moss pointed to such projects as the proposed Hetch Hetchy line, as well as the city’s evolving plans to implement more renewable power sources, as proof that supervisors should reject the TBC. Calling the cable a "potlatch," Moss said, "Time is our friend" in power matters. "Technology will change and improve, [and] we’re potentially rushing into a very expensive project." Mirkarimi did not return calls for comment, but at the hearing, he indicated he is still studying the cable and has not yet formed a position on it.

Philip DeAndrade, chair of the city’s Power Plant Task Force, expressed concerns that Pittsburg’s power plants burn "very available fossil fuels" for their generation and that these cheaper sources of electricity "might take out of the market mix" more renewable energy. DeAndrade also brought up the four gas-fired combustion turbines, known as peakers, that the city is in the process of bringing online. With these generators scheduled to go into service in 2009, as well as several PG&E transmission projects either in the works or already operational, DeAndrade said, "I’m not convinced [the TBC] is a good deal for San Francisco. What it looks like is a good deal for Babcock and Brown and the City of Pittsburg."

CAL-ISO insists that the TBC is the best reliability option for the region. Spokesperson Gregg Fishman said the peakers and other local energy projects will allow the system operator to stop relying on the inefficient Potrero Hill Power Plant. "But all that really does is keep us even in San Francisco. It doesn’t improve the reliability of the system at all — and in fact, with load [demand] growth we are actually falling slowly behind." Fishman later mentioned the added benefits of having power come in from a different direction. Currently, all power lines feeding the city travel up the Peninsula.

On March 13 the TBC cleared its first local regulatory hurdle when the Port Commission approved a licensing agreement for the cable’s facilities. Port officials, along with staff from the Mayor’s Office and other city agencies, spent weeks negotiating the terms of the deal with Babcock and Brown. The agreement grants the port annual rent payments in excess of $1 million, a needed cash infusion for the strapped agency.

The community benefits package gives the port an additional $5.5 million, with an as yet undetermined portion of those funds to be spent on open-space and energy-related projects on port-owned land. In addition to payments to the port, Babcock and Brown pledged more than $23 million to the SFPUC for sustainable energy programs, such as solar, wind, and tidal power initiatives.

Despite passing the licensing and benefits packages, port commissioners and their staff said they were not ruling on the project’s merits in terms of energy policy. Port special projects manager Brad Benson, who spearheaded the negotiations, told us, "Port staff does not believe we have the required expertise to rule on energy policy aspects [of the TBC]. We believe the Board of Supervisors is the preferred venue" to settle those questions.

Reached for comment, several San Francisco supervisors, either directly or through staff, told us they are still making up their minds about the project. Sup. Sophie Maxwell told us even if the cable is built, the city will not allow the new power line to sidetrack its efforts to use more environmentally friendly energy. "The city’s policy is renewable energy. Fossil fuel is not our first and primary desire." But, she added, Cal-ISO "determine[s] our power needs, and so we have to go along with that. We can’t say, ‘No … you’re wrong.’ "

Babcock and Brown vice president Dave Parquet praised the Port Commission for approving the licensing agreement and benefits package, telling us, "We are very pleased with the port’s [approval] and look forward to the Board of Supervisors’ decision." Samuel Wehn, the TBC’s project manager at Babcock and Brown, said, "I don’t think San Francisco [officials are] going to put their city in the position where they’re not going to be able to provide the kind of energy that’s needed to keep this city running."

Moss said those kinds of arguments are "business as usual" for the state in terms of energy policy. "Here [we] go again with another large infrastructure project that doesn’t contribute to solving climate change or moving our energy agenda forward."

He added, "It’s classic political science. Out of [the average ratepayer’s bill] it’s pennies per month, so nobody cares about it … but that doesn’t mean it’s not an expensive project. It is." Babcock and Brown, he said, "saw an opportunity to make a very fat profit margin, and they went for it like any good profiteer." *

1...14151617Page 15 of 17

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org