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Restless Citizens Should Consider Public Power
By James B. McClatchy

In case you haven't heard the rustling around the state, Gov. Davis, the natives are stirring - particularly in Northern California. They are alarmed and angry with the approach you're using to solve the electricity scandal - which, coincidentally, you will notice heating up again with summer's sun.

Governor, the people see a public ripoff emerging in which PG&E and Southern California Edison apparently will be relieved of most of their debts (but not their cash registers), and the state will become the owner of the utilities' transmission lines. The citizen-consumers will then pay off both the utilities' losses and the state bonds financing the purchase through an extra charge as part of their monthly service bills. This surcharge will probably go on for years.

Citizens are hearing that the transmission lines being acquired by the state need a lot of modernization and attention to deferred maintenance. There is also the need for the construction of additional major power lines to relieve bottlenecks in the existing transmission system.

Governor, some of the natives seem to think the utilities themselves should have been eliminating these bottlenecks, building new power lines and not deferring maintenance. They don't like having to pay for someone else's mistakes.

Shouldn't the primary purpose of all this activity be to provide electricity? Have the utilities instead been focused mainly on making money? Citizens would like you to answer a related question, governor: Were new plants not built because there was less profit in the building and operating of new plants in a semiregulated system, and more profit in putting money someplace else, with no regulation and no limits on profits?

When the utilities sold their generating plants, did they simply send their cash up the line to their parent companies, which got involved in the unregulated end of the business? Isn't it true that California utilities then had to buy electricity at grossly inflated free-market prices from generators out of state?

Governor, the natives smell a sweetheart deal coming out of smoke-filled rooms. In this deal, they will own old power lines and will buy electricity from companies that charge whatever the traffic will bear. This will make some speculators very rich.

The natives, who happen to be fellow citizens, are used to holding the sack in the pasture at midnight, waiting for the snipe to jump in. But it never does. In this case, they don't want to hold a bag filled only with broken dreams.

Your empty-bag solution is a mish-mash, obscuring the lines of responsibility and offering places for the most clever and conscience-less of speculators - personal and corporate - to find ways to avoid risk while squeezing the pocketbooks of consumers.

James B. McClatchy 
is publisher of The McClatchy Co., which owns The Sacramento Bee and other newspapers, and is a lifelong California journalist. This commentary was published March 18 in The Sacramento Bee. Reprinted with permission.

Our elected officials have a legal and moral duty to protect the public. Utilities have historically been masterful in manipulating public opinion and controlling energy decisions by public officials. Their absolute control was shaken with the disclosure of their wholesale corruption and dishonesty in the 1920s and 1930s throughout the United States.

The cracks in their political power that followed permitted the creation of many municipally owned utilities across the country, from tiny projects to full-scale, complete ownership by states. But the investor-owned utilities are still incredibly powerful in legislatures and city councils, with well-paid and skilled lobbyists and the support of subsidized so-called citizen groups.

For California, the healthiest solution is to create regionally and locally owned nonprofit enterprises managed locally to do the job, including generation of electricity and operation of distribution networks, with fair payments to the utilities for their properties.