Opinion: Who Won and Who Lost in the Campaign for a City-Run Electric Utility

In politics, the final vote isn’t always the final score.

That’s certainly the case with the City Council’s 8-0 vote earlier this month to reject the ballot proposal to replace San Diego Gas & Electric with a nonprofit public utility.

Of course, the council vote means the measure won’t be on the November ballot.

So supporters of San Diego Gas &Electric were able to maintain the status quo — for now. That means San Diegans will continue to pay rates among the nation’s highest for some time longer.

But the Power San Diego campaign raised the issue of creating a low-cost, nonprofit utility to an unprecedented level, while bringing sharp focus to the crisis of folks falling behind on paying their utility bills.

Customers in arrears now total more than 25% of SDGE’s customer base, with an average owed of more than $700.

With a small budget, the Power San Diego campaign attracted more than three hundred volunteers and collected some 30,000 petition signatures, all under a “Fire SDGE” banner.

That’s a flashing red light for the utility, which spends a fortune on media ads to bolster its image, in addition to more than $1 million the utility spent to oppose the Power San Diego campaign.

City Council members saw that flashing light — and got earfuls from hard-pressed consumers.

“Why is it that shareholder profits seem to be more important to SDGE than the ability of my senior citizens to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads?” asked Marni Von Wilpert, the District 5 councilwoman, as she recounted hardship tales from her constituents at the meeting on June 10th.

“The dam is breaking,” said Council President Sean Elo-Rivera, at the same session. “The rates and corporate practices are pushing people to a breaking point, financially and politically.”

Contrast those remarks with two or three years ago, when the council approved a franchise agreement allowing SDGE to earn billions in exchange for pennies on the dollar to San Diego. It’s that agreement that allows SDGE to do business here.

When the franchise deal was signed, the word “rates,” let alone “nation’s highest rates,” were rarely uttered by an elected official.

Never mind that more than 25% of San Diegans were also in arrears back then.

Far more folks will fall behind in utility bill payments, if SDGE succeeds in its plan to impose rate hikes of 10% in each of the next several years.

Perhaps most important accomplishment of the campaign for a nonprofit public utility is that popular and political discourse now much more closely reflect reality.

Until the Power San Diego campaign, SDGE earnings barely escaped the business pages. Now it’s common to hear folks rant about SDGE’s billion-dollars in profits last year (although the actual number was $936 million).

It’s also common knowledge that our electric rates are often the highest in the nation. And a growing number now know that every one of California’s nonprofit utilities – that’s 46 across the state — all charge substantially less than SDGE, in some cases 50% less.

There’s greater awareness because those hundreds of Power San Diego volunteers talked with thousands of area residents. The volunteers spread the word. And the feedback penetrated City Council chambers.

While they failed to put a nonprofit electric utility on the ballot, several council members were pressed to concede business as usual with SDGE is no longer possible.

The utility’s profits, said Joe La Cava, representative of District 1, are “not sustainable.”

The councilman said he’ll press to ensure the city has the information needed to make the call on creating a nonprofit utility prior to 2032. That will mark the midpoint of the city’s current agreement with SDGE, at which time the franchise agreement could be terminated.

Before then, it’s possible that organized labor’s opposition to nonprofit public power will weaken or collapse.

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers local, representing a minority of SDGE utility employees, at first said the proposal for a non-profit utility — which explicitly guarantees all union rights — was somehow union busting.

Making this hard to accept is that the same union represents workers at a nonprofit utility and that all of California’s many nonprofit utilities have labor contracts.

The SDGE electrical union later complained they had not been consulted on the measure for a nonprofit utility, or when Power San Diego did reach out, that the union had not been consulted early enough.

If organized labor wants to talk about creating a nonprofit utility, that’s welcome news to those who will continue to press for dumping SDGE and replacing it with a nonprofit utility to reduce rates and deal with the environmental crisis.

The interests of labor and nonprofit utility advocates should be aligned, as the 200,000 working families represented by unions the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council represents are hammered as hard as anyone by SDGE’s rates. And there’s no way to reduce those rates without eliminating the utility’s enormous profits and bloated salaries for a handful of top executives.

Besides, a vital union movement always seeks to bring more workers into its ranks. There are thousands of unorganized workers at SDGE. Under for-profit SDGE, however, management hired a union-busting firm to block efforts to organize those workers.

Obviously, the prospect for bringing those unorganized SDGE workers into unions will be far brighter with a union-friendly, nonprofit utility management. More dues-paying members always equals more clout.

The crisis of affordability will only grow worse as rates rise higher, at the same time the climate crisis worsens.

Right now, more people than ever believe there’s no better idea than creating a local nonprofit utility, which would be more aggressive in dealing with the climate crisis and slash costs by eliminating — remember it now — nearly a billion a year in SDGE profits.

Craig D. Rose, a semi-retired energy and business journalist, was a volunteer on the Power San Diego campaign.