July 6, 2001
The People's Power
Act One
We're on the edge of the twentieth century
and Mayor James Phelan of San Francisco concludes that without
abundant water and electrical power San Francisco is stymied.
He fixes his thirsty gaze upon Hetch Hetchy 200 miles east,,
a U-shaped glacial valley in the Sierra, flat-floored and hemmed
by 2,500-foot granite cliffs. Through it flows the abundant waters
of the Tuolumne river. Problem: Hetch-Hetchy lies within the
bounds of Yosemite National Park, and conservationists led by
John Muir vow a fight to the death to save the valley.
After an epic struggle Congress passes the Raker Act in 1913,
which okays the construction of a dam that will inundate Hetch
Hetchy. Muir dies the following year. Rep. John Raker, in whose
district Yosemite lies, is a progressive, a profound believer
in public power. Under the terms of his act the feds will waive
Hetch Hetchy's protected status to San Francisco. The dam must
be used not only to store water but also to generate electric
power. This power must be sold directly to the citizens of San
Francisco through a municipal power agency at the cheapest possible
rates. Publicly-owned water and electrical energy will free the
city from one another progressive congressman calls "the
thralldom ... of a remorseless private monopoly." If San
Francisco does not honor the terms of the Raker Act, it will
lose the federal waiver.
Act Two
By the early-twenties San Francisco
is watering itself with the Tuolumne, and it has built a powerhouse
at Moccasin Creek to use the Tuolumne's pent up power. It buys
hundreds of miles of copper wire to run that power into the city.
Pending completion of the power lines, it agrees to sell the
hydro-power to a rapidly growing utility company called Pacific
Gas & Electric, which will use its grid to carry the power
to San Francisco, at which point PG&E would sell the power
back to the citizenry at an outrageous mark-up. The city continues
to construct its own grid, but by this time PG&E has city
government in its pocket. The city manages to get its grid as
near to San Francisco as a PG&E switching station and then
the money runs out. The public's copper wire goes into storage.
The camel's nose is in under
the tent and there it stays. In the Roosevelt era Interior Secretary
Harold Ickes fights a tenacious struggle, capped by a favorable
US Supreme Court decision in the early 1940s, to force San Francisco
to abide by the terms of the Raker Act. PG&E's mayors, newspapers,
public utility commissioners, city supervisors and legislators
steadfastly thwart the bonds required to finance a municipally
owned utility.
Years go by. The Raker Act
is all but forgotten. PG&E rules supreme. In the mid-1960s
a young muckraker called Bruce Brugmannn comes to San Francisco.
He's grown up in Rock Rapids, Iowa, a public power town. He's
gone to school in Nebraska, thanks to George Norris a public
power state. He founds the San Francisco Bay Guardian and by
the late 1960s is deep into the PG&E wars. By now the utility
is trying to build a nuclear power station at Bodega Bay. Joe
Neilands and Charlie Smith, respectively a UC biochemist and
an organizer, mount a successful battle against PG&E's plan.
In the course of this campaign Neilands disinters the hidden
history of the Raker Act and Brugmann publishes the story.
Act Three
Let Brugmann carry our drama
forward.
"What heated me up and
got me increasingly angry over the years was that this was a
structural scandal of epic proportion. PG&E had stolen hundreds
of millions of dollars down the years. But it was verboten to
discuss PG&E publicly. The phrase is, When PG&E spits,
city hall swims. The company had wired the city, put out thousands
of dollars to various civic groups. It controlled the grand jury,
and to a large extent the judiciary. Then the downtown boys managed
to put in at-large elections in San Francisco, meaning candidates
had to raise large sums. That slowed us down for a generation.
"Finally we got district
elections again. That changed the rules of the game. Now we have
a more progressive board of supervisors, beholden to constituents
and their districts. Then we won a sunshine ordinance. We got
it through in '93 but City Hall loopholed it. In '99 we renewed
and strengthened it. Our coalition's third element was to build
a public power movement. We decided to push for a municipal
utility district. The best example is the one in Sacramento.
The McClatchy family's Bee newspapers got it through there.
"All the time we were up against the entire infrastructure
of the city, which still has the PG&E stamp on its logo.
But we we found the right formula. Our coalition got the 24,000
signatures last year. We dealt with each and every condition
the city attorney imposed. Then, in the first district elections
in years, our slate won, so we suddenly have a progressive 9-2
majority. At the Guardian we've tied down every supe to a pledge
to put MUD on the ballot and to support mud. We finally have
a pro public power and anti-PG&E majority. Of course we still
have to win the election. PG&E is lobbying behind the scenes,
putting millions into the fight, even though tho it's bankrupt.
But forthe first time in our memory nobody is running on a pro
PG&E platform."
Act Three is unfinished at
this time, but if ever there was a favorable moment, it's surely
now. When PG&E successfully pushed deregulation through the
California legislature in the mid-1990s it surely slapped itself
on the back for a master stroke. The public would pick up the
tab for the company's vast losses in nuclear power. Nationally,
the Clinton administration was ushering in a whole new era of
energy deregulation. The public power crowd were hemmed in and
"green" outfits like the Environmental Defense Fund
and Natural Resources Defense Council actually in the vanguard
of the dereg movement.
Now we have California state
attorney general Bill Lockyer pushing a criminal investigation
into the conspiracy to hike energy prices in California. Among
the big questions: Is PG&E a shark that got chewed by bigger
sharks from Houston, like Enron, or did the utility simply shuffle
its money elsewhere on the Monopoly board and then declare bankruptcy?
Almost a century after Raker sought to write public power into
the history of San Francisco, the tide is maybe turning, and
we have long-range populist campaigners like Brugmannn and the
Bay Guardian and its reporters like Tim Redmond and Savannah
Blackwell to thank for it. CP
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