In a conference call a while back, PG&E CEO Peter Darbee accidentally let slip the truth about his “taxpayer’s right to vote” act. Hardy-har. Basically, this initiative isn’t intended to really give anybody the vote, instead, it is intended to stop counties from even trying this sort of thing. Keep in mind, these words are direct from the mouth of Darbee:<\/p>\n
And the idea was to diminish, you know, rather than year after year different communities coming in as this or that and putting this up for vote and us having to spend millions and millions of shareholder dollars to defend it repeatedly, we thought that this was a way that we could sort of diminish that level unless there was a very strong, you know, mandate from voters that this was what they wanted to do. (John Geesman<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Here’s the thing, very rarely do you get 2\/3 of people to agree on anything. So PG&E is banking on counties never even bringing this stuff up for a vote, in all intents and purposes, killing community choice aggregation (CCA) in California forever.<\/p>\n
So, PG&E, why don’t we just call this what it is: Kill CCA Forever Act. That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s why you’ve been hounding Marin and San Francisco counties as they have been preparing to enter a CCA program? <\/p>\n
Look, the amount of money required to set up a CCA is a relatively small amount of money compared with other expenditures at the county level. I don’t have exact figures, because there hasn’t been a good case study for CCA. PG&E tries to kill them before they get out of the planning stages. Why require a vote on this one small issue when elected leaders can spend far more on other, costlier programs?<\/p>\n
The answer is clear, PG&E doesn’t like it because it messes with their bottom line. Despite the fact that they claimed that they would play nice with CCAs when they screwed up the power during the brownouts, they’ve continued to act in bad faith. (As an aside, the public power operators fared far better in terms of brownouts than PG&E and other private power companies)<\/p>\n
This has nothing to do with anybody’s right to vote. If we wanted to vote on everything we could move to Athens, circa 2500 years ago. But, California is too big for votes on every issue, and PG&E with its big corporate accounts overflowing with ratepayer money uses every last penny hiring fancy consultants to go around spreading lies about “how this is just about letting people vote.” They know it is a bunch of bullshit, and Darbee acknowledges that much.<\/p>\n
You think the PG&E spokespeople will be quoting Darbee about how he intends there to be less voting? Yeah, I’m not holding my breath.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"