Reclaiming S.F.'s Big Giveaway

Rob Morse Wednesday, February 7, 2001 ©2001 San Francisco Chronicle

URL:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/02/07/MN89641.DTL

We expect George W. Bush to be willfully obtuse about California's energy crisis. We didn't vote for him, so he'll solve our energy problems by eliminating emissions standards, drilling for oil in Alaska and giving us a tax cut so we can pay our utility bills.

That's what he said. Forward your $1,800 tax cut to the moguls at PG&E.

Next Bush will push for good old-fashioned whale oil production. Anything to tick off those West Coast liberals.

As Californians, we're used to people elsewhere gloating about our woes, even if our energy problems were largely written into our deregulation plan by Enron, a power outfit in Houston.

What doesn't make sense is that some of the "progressive" new members of San Francisco's Board of Supervisors are starting to back away from their promise to give voters a chance to dump Pacific Gas & Electric and replace the company with a municipal utility district.

PG&E may be short on electrical power, but it's still got plenty of political juice.

Former San Francisco Supervisor Angela Alioto was hopping mad because the vote to put the MUD initiative on the ballot is coming up on Monday, and high city officials are calling the impressionable new supervisors, urging them not to withdraw the power franchise that San Francisco gave to PG&E for a pittance 80 years ago.

"As a San Franciscan, I've been totally brokenhearted to see what we gave away," said Alioto. "This crisis is the first major crisis in which we can get back what belongs to us."

She pulled out a treasured book, "PG&E of California: The Centennial Story of the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, 1852 to 1952" by Charles M. Coleman.

This in-house history of the company begins with grand language, now somewhat ironic, about the "bold venturing of capital to perform a public service."

The book also can be remarkably honest about PG&E, as when it states that "the Company had fought hard to preserve itself from government competition."

That was in a section of the book about how San Francisco generates its own power at Hetch Hetchy, but lets PG&E distribute it for a small fee. Franklin Roosevelt's Interior Department successfully brought suit against this cozy arrangement, a violation of the congressional Raker Act, and the city then arranged to use its own power for streetcars, street lighting and other public purposes.

That's right, city properties like the Port and SFO don't get PG&E bills. They get power from the source, San Francisco.

The question now is why can't San Francisco use its own power for its citizens, and eliminate the fat and unreliable middleman of PG&E? The Sacramento Municipal Utility District works, so why not have one here?

In fact, why can't the entire state have government-run power? The utilities have been running the government, so turn the equation around. The only place PG&E's capital has been boldly venturing, to use the company's own phrase, is back to its parent company.

Pardon the California word, but instant karma got us. While we were following Nasdaq and playing with the Internet, we forgot that our computers are powered by, well, sparks on ropes.

We forgot that those ropes on poles are owned by utilities like PG&E, which doesn't stand for "Pretty Good and Evenhanded."

We didn't read 30 years (well, 31) of articles on PG&E by Bruce Brugmann in the Bay Guardian. Many of us called PG&E opponents like Alioto and Supervisor Tom Ammiano "flakes."

And we forgot the obvious thing: The word "deregulation" shouldn't mean "don't read this news story." It should be as scary a word as "dismemberment."

After all our experiences with airlines and phone companies, we should know that "deregulation" means we're about to be turned upside down and have our pockets shaken out.

Now's our chance to turn the utilities upside down. We've been robbed, and they've used our money to buy off the politicians.

Just before Angela Alioto went back to her law office, she showed me a single sentence in the book on PG&E's history. "This will break your heart," she said.

"San Francisco was the first city in the United States and, so far as is known, the first in the world to have a central generating station for distribution of electricity to customers."

Father Joseph Neri was a scientist at St. Ignatius College, which would later become the University of San Francisco, and he illuminated Market Street with arc lights for the people of San Francisco in 1876.

The Bay Area was a leader in high tech even then. The rolling blackout didn't come until much later.

Chronicle columnist Rob Morse appears on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. His e-mail address is rmorse@sfchronicle.com.

©2001 San Francisco Chronicle Page A2

-- Swissrose (cellier@azstarnet.com), February 08, 2001