Neilands letter to the Chronicle
 	 		
A letter to the Chronicle | October 31, 2001 | SFBG News                
 
by j.b. neilands

Your editorial of Oct. 21 in which you call for a "no" vote on 
Proposition F and Measure I is profoundly mistaken. It prompts me 
to record the following personal experience. 

Forty years ago I was actively engaged in a group attempting to 
block construction by Pacific Gas and Electric Co. of a nuclear 
generator on the Sonoma coast at Bodega. As an environmentalist 
and as a professor of biochemistry at UC Berkeley, I was very 
concerned about this preposterous scheme. The reactor was to be 
poised on the edge of the San Andreas Fault less than 50 miles 
upwind from the Bay Area. We thought, perhaps naively, that the 
California Public Utilities Commission would be sympathetic to 
our cause. When it became evident that this would not be the 
case, I addressed a letter to the CPUC asking if it had ever 
denied PG a "certificate of convenience and necessity." The CPUC 
answered that a search of its records revealed that no such 
denial had ever been issued. 

It was during the Bodega campaign that I first learned from the 
lips of an old California water and power man, Bill Reich, the 
words "Raker Act." At this point I had been reading the 
metropolitan dailies of San Francisco for a decade but had seen 
no mention of this key 1913 statute crucial to the lives of every 
person in the city and county. A trip to the library confirmed 
the existence of the Raker Act and inspired the authorship in 
1963 of a pamphlet titled The Raker Act: A Fifty Year Review. 
Copies of this mimeographed samizdat are in the Bancroft Library 
at UC Berkeley and in the California State Library in Sacramento. 
It was rejected as "an old story" by the San Francisco dailies 
but was published in 1969 by the Bay Guardian. 

The act, which bears the name of Rep. John E. Raker was a 
compromise allowing San Francisco to draw water and power from 
the federal property of Yosemite National Park, provided that 
none of the water or the electric energy could be resold. The 
Raker Act was an outright grant to the city and county of a type 
that had never been made before, and given the failure of the 
city to honor the power provision, it may never be made again. 

No less than eight times between 1927 and 1941 the city tried 
bond elections that would either extend the power line from 
Newark or acquire all or part of the PG distribution system. Each 
time, PG fought successfully by means of massive spending to 
maintain its tightly spaced and lucrative retail power system. A 
combination of the deep pockets of the power company, the 
machinations of devious politicians, and the cooperation of 
compliant newspapers doomed these efforts to comply with the 
Raker Act. After 1941 we went into the war years, Secretary of 
the Interior Harold Ickes passed from the scene, and the Raker 
Act disappeared from the radar screen. The topic is still 
systematically excluded from almost all of the print and 
electronic media. At the present time the taxpayers have paid for 
the construction of Moccasin, Kirkwood, and Holm powerhouses in 
the Hetch Hetchy system and for the stringing of wires 99 miles 
west to a PG substation at Newark, with interconnections to the 
Turlock and Modesto Irrigation Districts. To this date no 
residence or business in the city and county is energized with 
Hetch Hetchy hydropower. 

On Nov. 6 the voters have an opportunity by voting "yes" on I and 
F to cut loose from the dead hand of the PUC, which is, in the 
final analysis, only an elaborate pretension. The Sacramento 
Municipal Utility District closed its nuclear generator at Rancho 
Seco by a vote of the people and has gone on to set an industry 
standard in solar development. There is thus great promise in a 
public power system for sensitivity to the environment, not to 
mention the added virtues of lower rates and community control. 

J.B. Neilands submitted this letter to the San Francisco 
Chronicle, but it had not been published by our press time. He is 
the author of the original Bay Guardian Raker Act story of March 
27, 1969. "A Chronicle of Shame" and other updated Neilands 
reports appear online at www.sfbg.com/News/36/05/05oped.html 
[http://www.sfbg.com/News/36/05/05oped.html] . 

[http://www.sfbg.com]