If ever any corporation earned regulatory legislation, PG&E did so when they spent nearly $50 million of ratepayer funds to try to pass a constitutional amendment to guarantee the monopoly.  And Mark Leno is making it happen.

Senator Mark Leno today announced legislation that would prevent Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) from using ratepayer funds to finance future political campaigns. The bill allows the corporation to continue participating in political campaigns, but stipulates that money derived from ratepayers cannot be used for political or public affairs expenditures.

Senator Leno’s bill requires PG&E to report its annual political and public affairs spending to the California Public Utilities Commission. The PUC will ensure that all political and public affairs spending identified in this report did not derive from ratepayer funds.

This is already the rule for municipal utitilies.  And, frankly, if PG&E wants to guarantee its monopoly so much, they should be totally fine with competing on a level playing field.

What do you think the odds of that are?

I’ve been a political campaign junkie for years.  And the frustrating part about this job is that after going to Election Night parties, I have to go home and write about it for readers to view the next morning.  So if a particular race takes the whole night to resolve, I could be up very late.  But I had no problem sticking around the “No on 16” campaign party last night until 1:00 a.m. – monitoring the results with Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, State Senator Mark Leno and our good friends at TURN.  Because last night’s defeat of Prop 16 was one of the most historic victories in California history.  Outspent over 1,000-to-one by a monster utility company, consumer advocates defeated by a 52-47 margin an odious measure that would have cemented PG&E’s monopoly. To call this a David & Goliath victory does not give it justice.  As my friend Robert Cruickshank wrote at Calitics, it’s like “an ant taking down an elephant.”  Oh, and Prop 17 failed too.

PG&E is desperate to stop community choice aggregation – where local governments can purchase energy to offer their constituents a “public option” to the company’s monopoly.  Proposition 16 would have required a two-thirds vote of the electorate before cities can do community choice aggregation, and cynically dubbed it the Taxpayer’s Right to Vote.

Never mind that taxpayers already have the right to vote out their elected officials – if they don’t support community choice aggregation.  Never mind that ratepayers were not given the chance on voting for PG&E as their energy provider.  Public power is not even one of my top “issues,” but I was outraged that PG&E would try something like Prop 16.

PG&E shattered campaign spending records with $46 million to pass Prop 16 – ratepayer money that we give them every month when we pay our energy bills.  The only organized opposition was TURN (the Utility Reform Network), who only raised $90,000.  Bloggers got creative by making “No on 16” videos, and a hilarious Twitter feed.  But the campaign often seemed like a rag-tag army tilting at the windmills.

When I arrived at the “No on 16” party at Otis Lounge around 9:30 p.m., the results were looking bad.  We were down by about three points, but the night was still young.  Having watched statewide campaigns for years, I knew it would ultimately come down to Los Angeles County – so I quickly went online to check how we were doing down there.

Not good.  The early absentees had Prop 16 winning L.A. County by 13 points, far worse than where we were statewide.  If this kept on during the night, it was going to be painful.  The public power entity in Los Angeles had just raised rates, and folks at the party said it may be why Prop 16 was doing so well.  Small comfort for the largest county in the state.

Mark Toney of TURN was saying we should be proud that we held PG&E to such a close margin, after having been outspent nearly 1,000-to-one – but I cringed when I heard that.  We were losing.  Sure, we were doing pretty well in Northern California – where people know and hate PG&E, but we were getting creamed down south.  Where the votes are.

But as the night wore on, some folks pointed out how well we were doing in counties like Fresno, Madera, and Mariposa.  These are conservative places in the Central Valley, but PG&E had alienated these customers with “smart meters.”  I checked how we were doing in San Benito County – which political junkies often say is the bellwether of California state politics.  We were slightly ahead in San Benito County, but only by about 50 votes.

And the L.A. County numbers were trickling in – slowly, but surely.  We were still losing there, but the margin was noticeably trending in our favor.  By now, everyone at the party was huddled around a small number of laptops – while I double-checked the Secretary of State’s website with what individual counties were saying.  Places like San Diego and Orange County were coming in where we were behind, but we were not losing ground.

Pretty soon, our three-point loss became a one-point lead – and there was a palpable sense in the air that we could win it.  I wasn’t convinced yet – scouring the L.A. County numbers to see if this positive trend in our favor was not going to start reversing itself.

When 58% of L.A. County had been counted, we were ahead there.  I got up, and boldly shouted that we had won.  It reminded me of the scene in Milk, when Jim Rivaldo tells Harvey Milk not to worry about the Briggs Initiative.  L.A. County had just come in, and we were going to win.  By now, I was sure that we had slain the Prop 16 dragon.

During that whole time, Proposition 17 – Mercury Insurance’s scam to rip off consumers – had been ahead by a wider margin than Prop 16.  As we were all fixated on the Prop 16 results, it became apparent that Prop 17 results were following similar trends.  By the end of the evening, Prop 17 had likewise had the same fate – it also lost by about five points.

As of 4:00 this morning, Prop 16 is losing 47-53 – with 91.6% of all precincts reporting.  Not only is this a stunning rebuke of PG&E, but it is a strong mandate for public power.  Californians want a choice in the energy marketplace, and are ready for a “public option” that provides them with competitive rates and renewable energy sources.

And PG&E will deserve every share of anger, rebuke and humiliation coming at it.

Paul Hogarth is the Managing Editor of Beyond Chron, San Francisco’s Alternative Online Daily, where this piece was first published.

Prop	Yes	No	D/K
13 (seismic retrofit)	46	26	26
14(open primary)	50	28	22
15(fair elections)	29	46	26
16(PG&E protection)	41	45	14
17 (Mercury Ins scheme)	43	39	18

SurveyUSA has released their latest batch of data on the propositions and the LG race.  You can see the polling data on the props to the right.  As you can tell, these are some pretty worrying numbers.  Props 14 and 15 seem to be going the exact opposite of how we would like to see them going.  And 16 and 17 seem to be hovering in that troubling zone. If I had to bet, I would go with both of those failing. But, it’s going to be a long night on those two.’

As for the LG’s race, Newsom and Maldonado have pretty substantial leads there.  On the Democratic side, Newsom leads Hahn 43-27 right now, with 9% going to Eric Korevaar (which will wither by the time we get the results) and 21% undecided. Newsom looks set to pull this one off tomorrow.

On the Republican side, St. Abel leads Sam Aanestad 26-16, with 32% undecided and the rest going to a smattering of other candidates.  Now, thing is here that Aanestad might pick up a lot of last minute support from the far-right.  I think this one is hardly a lock for Maldo, and we might be in for a bit of a surprise here.

So, folks, what this shows me is that every vote is extremely important.  Demand that your friends and family vote!

Speaker Pelosi doesn’t wade into every one of our ballot fights, but when the issue is contentious enough, and/or egregious enough, she’ll say something. PG&E’s $46 Million investment in Prop 16 is getting closer to passing. How could it not with that much spending. I don’t even regularly watch TV and I’ve caught a few of the rather irritating and deceptive ads.  This is egregious enough.

And so today, Speaker Pelosi weighed in to the fight on Prop 16 and coming out strongly in opposition to PG&E’s Monopoly Protection Scheme. On the steps of City Hall, her chief of staff appeared at a press conference at City Hall to make the Speaker’s position clear.

How egregious you might ask is Prop 16? Well, well over 60 newspapers have eviscerated the measure, with but one or two in support.  Over 60 cities have announced official opposition to the measure.

But the fact is that PG&E is going all out for the win here.

Prop 16 is the ballot initiative that would limit the ability of cities and counties to go into the public power business. San Francisco Supervisor Ross Mirkirimi says if the measure passes, it would encourage other corporations to take their issues straight to the voters.

“It is obvious that if PG&E prevails, they will be the first corporation to embed themselves into our state constitution,” he said. (ABC7)

We need turnout. PG&E has aligned themselves with the Republicans, and this is going to be a GOP friendly election.  Democrats must turn out or it is very possible that PG&E’s money may work. Please, let your friends, family and random people on the street know the importance of turning out on Tuesday.  We must beat this thing.

Several weeks ago, I noticed that one of my friends on Facebook was a “fan” of Proposition 16 – PG&E’s Monopoly Protection Act that is easily the worst measure on the June ballot.  After I chewed him out for it, he expressed shock to even be on that page.  Apparently, PG&E had added him on as a supporter without his consent.  Today, just as the Prop 16 campaign boasted that it now has 50,000 “fans” on Facebook, I received a press release from the Sunrise Center in Marin County – who complained that some of their own staffers (who are working hard to defeat Prop 16) have also been added as “fans.”  Besides exposing a serious loophole in Facebook’s privacy features, it also proves that PG&E’s $40 million campaign to pass Prop 16 includes committing identity theft.

Christy Michaels, the Corte Madera-based Sunrise Center office manager, said she was surprised to hear from a friend that an ad showed up on her friend’s Facebook page claiming, “Christy Michaels likes Prop 16.” When Christy went online she found she was named as a supporter of PG&E-funded Prop 16 on the Sunrise Center Facebook page and her personal page.

Women’s Energy Matters (WEM) is reporting these incidents to the Secretary of State, Attorney General, California Public Utilities Commission and State Senator Mark Leno, asking for immediate investigations and injunctions against PG&E and Facebook. WEM, Christy, and Kiki are advocates for Marin Clean Energy, the community-run alternative to PG&E that launched May 7th and provides local residents and businesses twice the renewable energy as PG&E at the same cost.  If Prop 16 passes, local communities would require a two-thirds vote to create a similar “public option” to PG&E – which scares the giant utility company because they would have to face competition.

Barbara George, Executive Director of WEM commented, “The whole point of Facebook is to be in touch with people you know and trust, so for PG&E’s campaign to misappropriate Facebook identities and friends lists in order to falsely claim that people ‘like’ Prop 16 is an intolerable invasion of privacy and subversion of democracy. The June 8 election on  this measure has been tainted by massive false advertising and dirty  tricks, and Facebook identity theft is a new low. PG&E is already spending $46 million on TV and print ads promoting Proposition 16 which, if it passes, would make it virtually impossible for communities to follow Marin’s lead to provide cleaner cheaper power for their residents and businesses.”

Attorney General Jerry Brown should consider pressing criminal charges against PG&E, who appears to have committed identity theft.  Ironically, Facebook’s former Chief Privacy Officer — Chris Kelly — is running to replace Brown in next week’s election.

Prop 16 has had more negative editorial board reviews than Ishtar, yet, PG&E is still pumping money into this dud. Whether will be worth PG&E’s money is a question that can only be answered by the voters of California.

Whether it is good policy is a question with an objective answer: NO.  This is the answer from good government groups, editorial boards, progressive organizations, and non-partisan groups.  It is a policy that’s great for PG&E, terrible for the state and its ratepayers.  Today the San Jose Mercury News threw down on PG&E’s hidden agenda scheme:

Surely you’ve heard the ads, wedged between Steve Poizner’s cries of “Liberal!” and Meg Whitman’s attempts to sound tough.

“And we don’t even have the right to vote on it!” whine the indignant actors, as if they’re victims of an evil government conspiracy.

Don’t be fooled. These ads, like the rest of PG&E’s estimated $45 million campaign to pass Proposition 16, are full of lies. PG&E calls the measure the Taxpayers’ Right to Vote Act, but it’s really the PG&E Monopoly Protection Act. So we can’t resist another reminder to vote no. …

One thing that’s clear about PG&E’s campaign is where it got the $45 million for all those ads. From you. Unless you’re lucky enough to live in a PG&E-free city like Santa Clara. Exercise your right to vote on Proposition 16: Say no. Tell PG&E to stop spending your money to thwart your best interests – and to stop lying. (SJ Merc)

It’s really not a big ask, even from a corporation like PG&E: don’t lie to the voters of California.  However, it’s too much to ask of PG&E these days They’re spending $45 million to get Prop 16 passed, but it’s still sinking in the polls. There won’t be any big ad buys for No on 16, just the small matter of being right.

It is my sincere hope that the voters of California will see beyond PG&E’s lies and smack them on the head for over-reaching by spending ratepayer money on anti-consumer initiatives.

PG&E is calling its monopoly protection measure the “Taxpayer’s Right to Vote” Act.  Which is kind of like calling Arnold a “liberal” or even a moderate.  It just couldn’t be further from the truth.

But, Prop 16 is inspiring some good ol’ fashioned grassroots activism, and with today’s tools, the cost of producing some great videos makes them accessible to all.  I’ll let the video do the explaining:

We mentioned this yesterday in the open thread, but since the folks at NoProp16films.org have gone full out and made a whole series of HD videos, I think it is worth its own post.

You can check out the whole series of them, but this is one of my favorites at the site.  The open thread has a good summary video, and over the flip you’ll find a video in Spanish.

PG&E & PROP 16* from No on Prop16 Films on Vimeo.

There are a lot of bad actors in California government right now. There are special interests with special interests.  Yet if you had to look for a list of companies that are exploiting the state with deceptive tactics, you would be hard pressed to top PG&E.  

And the latest rebuke isn’t even about Prop 16, their deceptive monopoly preservation proposition.  Instead, it is about Marin County’s community choice aggregation (CCA) program, where PG&E is fighting to keep customers on their roles.  And lying to do it.

California utility regulators Monday warned Pacific Gas & Electric Co. to stop using telephone and direct-mail tactics that could derail competition from the state’s first nonprofit group to offer electric service.

The warning letter from the California Public Utilities Commission came in the midst of PG&E’s $35-million campaign to pass Proposition 16, a statewide initiative on the June 8 ballot aimed at making it harder for local governments and citizens to form nonprofits to provide electricity. … (The PUC) said PG&E’s mailers to customers were “misleading” and the utility “must refrain from sending any mailers of this nature in the future.”(LA Times)

At this point, if there is a rule, PG&E will do its best to go as far as possible to violate it. If they make a promise, as they did with honoring the will of the people to create CCAs, is it worth anything any more?

We simply can’t trust PG&E with a monopoly on power anymore.