{"id":11603,"date":"2010-04-29T20:53:05","date_gmt":"2010-04-29T20:53:05","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2010-04-29T20:53:05","modified_gmt":"2010-04-29T20:53:05","slug":"did-pge-boss-admit-prop-16-is-anticompetitive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/2010\/04\/29\/did-pge-boss-admit-prop-16-is-anticompetitive\/","title":{"rendered":"Did PG&E Boss Admit Prop 16 Is Anti-Competitive?"},"content":{"rendered":"

That’s what a group of public utilities, led by Sacramento MUD, are alleging<\/a> in a lawsuit:<\/p>\n

A coalition of locally owned public utilities, including the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, are claiming that Pacific Gas & Electric Corp. Chairman Peter A. Darbee essentially admitted at a March 1 investor conference that Proposition 16 is designed to choke off competition….<\/p>\n

Papers filed late Wednesday in Sacramento Superior Court in the public utilities’ lawsuit to get the measure kicked off the ballot allege that Darbee acknowledged Prop. 16 aims to “greatly diminish” voting, discourage elections, and relieve PG&E of “having to spend millions and millions of shareholder dollars” to campaign against competing energy suppliers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The admission is key to getting the proposition tossed. But it doesn’t change the fact that even without such an admission, Prop 16’s practical effect would definitely be to choke off competition and protect PG&E’s existing monopoly across much of Northern California. <\/p>\n

They want to create a 2\/3rds rule for themselves, making it very difficult for a majority of voters to create a public power district or community choice aggregation that can help deliver renewable power to localities. PG&E isn’t doing this because they care about taxpayers, but because they don’t want Davis to join SMUD, or San Francisco to finally create its own public power system, or Marin County to be able to continue running its CCA system.<\/p>\n

Whatever the fate of the lawsuit, the right move is to reject this corporate power grab by voting no on Prop 16.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That’s what a group of public utilities, led by Sacramento MUD, are alleging<\/a> in a lawsuit:<\/p>\n

A coalition of locally owned public utilities, including the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, are claiming that Pacific Gas & Electric Corp. Chairman Peter A. Darbee essentially admitted at a March 1 investor conference that Proposition 16 is designed to choke off competition….<\/p>\n

Papers filed late Wednesday in Sacramento Superior Court in the public utilities’ lawsuit to get the measure kicked off the ballot allege that Darbee acknowledged Prop. 16 aims to “greatly diminish” voting, discourage elections, and relieve PG&E of “having to spend millions and millions of shareholder dollars” to campaign against competing energy suppliers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The admission is key to getting the proposition tossed. But it doesn’t change the fact that even without such an admission, Prop 16’s practical effect would definitely be to choke off competition and protect PG&E’s existing monopoly across much of Northern California. <\/p>\n

They want to create a 2\/3rds rule for themselves, making it very difficult for a majority of voters to create a public power district or community choice aggregation that can help deliver renewable power to localities. PG&E isn’t doing this because they care about taxpayers, but because they don’t want Davis to join SMUD, or San Francisco to finally create its own public power system, or Marin County to be able to continue running its CCA system.<\/p>\n

Whatever the fate of the lawsuit, the right move is to reject this corporate power grab by voting no on Prop 16.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1990],"tags":[8405],"class_list":["post-11603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1990","tag-8405"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pvhz-319","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11603\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}