Willie Brown and PG shut down the Hunters Point power plant -- rather
than give the city a public-power beachhead.                                            
 	 		 		
SFBG News | Dirty deal | June 7, 2000
 		 		 		 		
Dirty deal

By Savannah Blackwell [Savannah_Blackwell@sfbg.com] 
						
AFTER WEEKS of secret negotiations, Mayor Willie Brown and 
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. have agreed to shut down the 
utility's Hunters Point power plant -- in a deal that once again 
undermines the city's ability to establish a public-power 
beachhead and at the same time threatens the environment of 
another neighborhood.
 						
The deal, announced by Brown and PG CEO Gordon Smith at a July 13 
press conference, will probably end the release of dangerous 
toxic emissions from the plant on Evans Avenue into the 
Bayview-Hunters Point community within three years. But it 
thwarts the modest steps the city has taken toward expanding 
public control of local power generation -- and could result in 
PG's Potrero Hill plant emitting higher levels of pollution than 
before.
 						
The agreement, which Smith called "revolutionary," was largely 
negotiated by PG senior vice president of governmental and 
regulatory relations Daniel Richard and mayoral economic advisor 
Kofi Bonner. It shows the astounding lengths to which longtime 
allies Brown and PG will go to block any move toward public power 
and avoid a legal fight between the city and the utility.
 						
"As a supporter of public power, I think we should proceed with 
caution here," Supervisor Tom Ammiano told the Bay Guardian. "I'm 
glad the Bayview community got the Hunters Point plant shut down, 
but I'm disappointed we didn't get to move ahead with increasing 
public control of resources and energy development."
 						
The Bayview-based Southeast Alliance for Environmental Justice 
(SAEJ) has urged the city to buy both plants and shut them down. 
Bayview residents suffer from unusually high rates of breast 
cancer, asthma, and other illnesses influenced by toxic 
pollution. SAEJ has argued that city control of the plants is the 
surest way to reduce toxic emissions.
 						
For the past month, the Board of Supervisors and the city's 
Public Utilities Commission have been planning to take over the 
Hunters Point and Potrero Hill plants -- the only power plants 
within the city limits -- through eminent domain (see "Poison 
Power," 1/28/98, and "S.F. v. PG," 6/17/98). Once it owned the 
plants, the city would have shut down the Hunters Point plant and 
consolidated energy generation at the Potrero plant. The two 
natural gas-fired plants provide the city with roughly half of 
its energy.
 						
To that end, Deputy City Attorney Tom Berliner was negotiating 
with private utility CMS Generation of Dearborn, Mich., to put up 
the money for the city to buy the two plants. In exchange, the 
city offered CMS the rights to profits from future energy 
generation contracts.
 						
It was far from an ideal partnership. CMS owns nuclear and 
coal-fired plants, has a dubious environmental record, and is 
involved in takeovers of publicly owned systems. But it 
represented a first step toward expanding the city's energy 
portfolio.
 						
"If the city had purchased these plants, it would have been a 
giant step toward public power and public control of resources. 
We didn't get that," Alan Ramo of Golden Gate University's 
Environmental Law and Justice Clinic, which provides counsel to 
SAEJ, told the Bay Guardian. "In the short run we are getting 
what we would have gotten with city ownership. But it leaves open 
what happens 10 to 15 years from now, when there are viable 
alternatives to fossil fuels."
 						
The proposed agreement between the city and PG, which requires 
approval from the Board of Supervisors and the local and state 
public utilities commissions, calls for PG to decommission the 
Hunters Point plant "as soon as the facility is no longer needed 
to sustain electric reliability in San Francisco." In the 
meantime PG has agreed to run the Hunters Point plant only when 
the Independent System Operator (ISO), an oversight body created 
by the state legislature, decides the power is needed. PG will 
still own the site once the plant is gone; the city will have the 
first chance to buy it. The agreement stipulates that another 
power plant cannot be built on the Hunters Point site.
 						
The Potrero plant is as old as the Hunters Point plant and 
presents environmental problems of its own. The city's Public 
Health Department calls it the second largest stationary source 
of pollution in San Francisco, after the Hunters Point plant. In 
an initial environmental inspection, a PG consultant found "black 
tar-like deposits," which indicate the presence of carcinogenic 
petroleum-based chemicals in the soil.
 						
PG officials say it's likely that the Potrero plant will be sold 
to a private buyer, then expanded to replace the energy that had 
been generated by the Hunters Point plant. The agreement says the 
city and PG will advocate to minimize environmental damage -- but 
it also bars the city from imposing any conditions on the sale of 
the Potrero plant, including environmental protections. The 
plant's buyer will simply be required to meet with the mayor to 
discuss the environmental impacts of expanding the plant.
 						
"The Potrero plant, which currently generates about 350 
megawatts, could go up to 750 megawatts and emit zero emissions," 
Richard told the Bay Guardian. "This agreement proves that we can 
have a good confluence of business, community, and environmental 
objectives."
 						
The agreement came as a surprise to Jim Firth, a member of the 
executive board of the Potrero League of Active Neighbors. 
"Obviously of concern is what environmental impacts there will be 
and if it will affect the degree of air pollution as a result of 
increasing the plant's usage," Firth told us. "The hours of 
operation will be a concern. Noise from the plant has already 
been a problem."
 						
"A number of questions have not been addressed," Robin David, 
shop steward at the Hunters Point plant for the International 
Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, told the Bay Guardian. "The 
employees of the plants get left out in the cold, and the city's 
increased control of generation is dropped as well. We are hoping 
the city will take some interest in the employees."
 						
Smith said at the press conference that PG intended to make up 
the loss from not selling the Hunters Point plant when it sells 
its Potrero plant in a package with facilities it owns in the 
East Bay and Sonoma County.
 						
While SAEJ representatives are grateful to the mayor and PG for 
agreeing to close the Hunters Point plant, they also say the 
group will be carefully monitoring what happens next. SAEJ didn't 
know the details of the deal until an hour before the 9 a.m. 
press conference.
 						
"In trying to get the city to seize these, we mentioned that if 
it meant just shifting the pollution to another community, we're 
not in favor of that," SAEJ president Claude Wilson told us. "The 
real issue is going to be when the [Potrero] plant is conveyed to 
a new owner. If they are going to pull the guts out of it, 
repower it, and retrofit it with new technology so that it will 
not pollute any more than it has, then we feel comfortable. But 
we don't know what they're going to do, and we don't know who 
will be doing it. That causes a bit of anxiety.
 						
"I'm glad the mayor said in public that SAEJ will be monitoring 
the process as it goes along. We're going to ensure as best as we 
possibly can that we will work in concert with the city to see 
that there won't be the same kind of health impacts or pollution 
as we've been suffering from."
 						
P.S. The Chronicle and Examiner continued to black out the 
campaign for public power. In a July 14 article, the Chronicle 
called the closure "a victory for environmentalists and Hunters 
Point residents." The paper didn't mention potential 
environmental damage from the Potrero plant. All the Chron had to 
say about the city's move toward public power -- the main reason 
PG offered to close the plant -- fit in a single sentence at the 
bottom of the story: "The agreement ends the city's brief 
flirtation with the idea of running its own power generating 
plants." The Examiner weighed in the same day with a story that 
didn't mention public power at all. Neither paper called any 
public-power activists.
 						
[http://www.sfbg.com/searchit.html]