Free Speech
by Tim Redmond
In San Francisco, electricity prices are soaring, and rolling blackouts are becoming the order of the day. In Los Angeles—a city we all like to joke about—electricity is plentiful and cheap, and nobody’s worried about the lights going off.
The big difference: Los Angeles has a public-power system. So the deregulation disaster doesn’t affect the residents of that city. I called a friend of mine who lives in LA the other day, and we got to talking about the energy crisis. He’s a lot more conservative than I am—he thinks taxes are too high, and the government is too big. But he’s quite happy with his electricity bill, which he pays to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. And he’s quite happy with the service he gets.
“I don’t understand why people are against the government running electric utilities,” he told me. “It’s one of the few things that government actually does well.” He’s got a point: More than 2,000 cities in the United States have publicly owned utilities, and virtually all of them function well. In Northern California, 11 cities have public power, including Palo Alto, Santa Clara, Alameda and Sacramento. All of them enjoy lower electric rates than San Francisco.
If a grassroots coalition called the Campaign for Lower Utility Bills (CLUB) gets its way, San Francisco will soon join the public-power fold. CLUB has gathered 24,000 signatures on a petition to form a Municipal Utility District in this city, and the issue appears to be headed for the November ballot.
If there were ever a city where public power makes sense, it’s San Francisco. The City already owns its own hydroelectric dam—in Hetch Hetchy Valley, in Yosemite National Park. The dam was built under a unique act of Congress, the Raker Act of 1913, which allowed San Francisco to dam the Tuolumne River for water and flood a beautiful valley in a national park (breaking the heart of conservationist John Muir). The condition of the grant: The City also had to generate electricity from the dam, and sell it through a local public-power agency.
The act was an historic compromise between conservationists and public-power advocates; the debate in Congress at the time made it very clear that the goal of the law was to prevent any private-power company—specifically, PG&E—from dominating the energy market in Northern California.
But the city has never lived up to the bargain. The water got here, as did a little trickle of the power (it runs the lights at City Hall, the Muni buses and the airport). But (thanks to high-powered and very effective lobbying by PG&E) the City never set up its own power agency. So most of the power from the Hetch Hetchy dam—power owned by the people of San Francisco, generated at a facility built and paid for by the people of San Francisco—winds up being sold off at low rates to irrigation districts in the Central Valley. And all of us who live and work in San Francisco pay high prices for PG&E’s power.
A Municipal Utility District would be run by an independent, five-member board, elected by and directly accountable to the people of San Francisco. Its mandate would be to duplicate successful public-power efforts in other cities, to bring residents and local businesses cheaper electricity. With PG&E bills likely to double and triple in coming months, MUD could save us hundreds of millions of dollars—money that would stay in the local economy.
The long-term solutions to the state’s energy crisis will be complex, and almost certainly expensive. But for San Francisco, the answer is simple: Energy independence and low rates, through MUD.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of the SFAA or theÊSFÊApartment Magazine. Tim Redmond is executive editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian.