The truth about the utility's P.R. campaign against public 
power. 
 
sfbg.com
  
October 2, 2002 

Big PG lies

By Rachel Brahinsky
 
File this under "strictly shameless": A flyer sent out to voters 
on the city's conservative west side, and designed like a 
cigarette health warning, cautions that public power Proposition 
D "may be hazardous to our City's health." Put together by 
Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s front group San Franciscans 
Against the Blank Check, the campaign mailer is a cynical twist 
on the effort by public power advocates to use Prop. D to help 
close the polluting power plants on the city's east side, long 
believed to be poisoning low-income San Franciscans of color. 
These communities have experienced health problems such as 
asthma, cancer, and heart disease, all of which may be related to 
pollution from two nearby plants. 

The mailer is just one plank in the utility's campaign (managed 
by P.R. firm Solem and Associates) to derail the public power 
effort. Below we dismantle two of the biggest lies of the 
campaign so far, which can be found on the group's Web site, 
www.noblankcheck.org. 

Lie number one: PG says Prop. D won't help shut down the Hunters 
Point power plant. When Sups. Sophie Maxwell and Tom Ammiano 
wrote Prop. D, one of their primary goals was to close PG's aging 
and polluting Hunters Point power plant.

Yet PG and its representatives are claiming that Prop. D won't 
help the city shutter the plant. They argue that the Independent 
System Operator, a state agency, has the final say over the 
plant's future and that a local ballot initiative could not 
influence its fate. That's true: the plant remains open – four 
years after Mayor Willie Brown signed an agreement that was 
supposed to shut it down – because the ISO says that until there 
are new energy resources in place, we need the plant for system 
reliability. 

But PG hasn't built any new power plants, and the city hasn't had 
the funds or the policy directive it would need to move forward 
on its own. PG plans to build a new transmission line, which will 
help, but there's no guarantee it will complete this project soon 
enough. 

The quickest way to close the plant, according to city power 
managers, is to use a multilayered approach: energy efficiency 
and new (cleaner and smaller) power plants, along with a new 
transmission line. Prop. D can fund all of these and would give 
the city a voter mandate to push forward with creating 
alternatives to the poison of the old power plant. 

Lie number two: PG says a public San Francisco power utility 
won't have cheaper rates than PG. PG's supporters like to remind 
voters how the energy crisis hit the Lassen Municipal Utility 
District, the state's newest public power agency. It's true: LMUD 
made several bad decisions and was forced to buy electricity on 
the open market during the height of the energy crisis. Rates 
soared 48 percent, prompting a consumer revolt in which four 
members of LMUD's board of directors were recalled. (PG's front 
group claims Lassen's rates went up 70 percent. This is an 
outright lie.) 

Even with the jump in rates, Lassen's prices remained lower than 
PG's, and this winter the utility brought rates back down 20 
percent. Today a Lassen residential consumer using 500 kwh of 
power each month pays $61; that same customer in San Francisco 
would pay PG $74.55. 

Meanwhile the 2,009 public power agencies nationwide charge an 
average of 20 percent less than private power companies, 
according to Sacramento-based energy consulting firm R.W. Beck. 
PG claims that a new utility would not achieve those savings – 
but that's where Lassen is instructive. Even LMUD, a victim of 
the energy crisis, charges far less than PG. 

Also key: when rates go up, consumers are able to respond by 
replacing the board and can hold the general manager (who is a 
public official) accountable. When PG announced its 40 percent 
rate hike last year, consumers had no recourse. There's no way to 
recall the PG board. Now in bankruptcy court, PG is pushing to 
keep rates artificially high for the next decade to pad corporate 
profits. The only real way to recall PG is to pass Prop. D. 

For more information on Prop. D go to www.sfbg.com or 
www.powertothepeople.org. For more on public power go to 
www.appanet.org. The

Bay Guardian, Bay Guardian editor and publisher Bruce B. 
Brugmann, and associate publisher Jean Dibble are contributors to 
the Yes on D campaign. E-mail Rachel Brahinsky at  
[rachel@sfbg.com] .