U-T Editorial Board: San Diego Residents Trust City Council Less Than They Trust SDG&E

Lack of Trust Reason Power San Diego Couldn’t Collect Enough Signatures for Ballot

San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board / May 17, 2024

San Diego Gas & Electric is easily the least objectionable of the state’s three giant investor-owned utilities. It is not a corporate felon on “a crime spree,” as a federal judge described Pacific Gas & Electric in 2022. It didn’t launch the clandestine scheme to make ratepayers cover far too much of the cost of shuttering the broken San Onofre nuclear plant. Though SDG&E benefited, that was the work of an Edison executive.

But between SDG&E’s extremely high billing rates, its massive profits, its support for controversial changes in rules on homes with solar panels and its failed attempts to shift $379 million of costs from 2007 wildfires to ratepayers, it is a piñata in local conversational circles. Griping about the utility is as common as chatter about the Padres.

So the effort by the Power San Diego coalition to supplant SDG&E with a municipal electric utility within city limits should have been an easy sell. Instead, the group couldn’t come even close to its goal of collecting 80,000 verified signatures so voters could consider the takeover in November’s election. It provided the county Registrar of Voters with about 31,000 signatures on Tuesday.

Organizers attempted to put the best light on the situation by saying that under the City Charter, they had probably turned in enough valid signatures to allow the City Council to place the measure directly on the ballot.

But what’s the point? The reason the signature-gathering failed is because San Diegans have an even lower opinion of City Hall than they do of SDG&E. Power San Diego never had a credible answer to the basic question asked by many residents: How could the city be trusted to do even a minimally competent job running a power utility?

Yes, communities like Anaheim and Sacramento have had success with such utilities. But this has little relevance to San Diegans contemplating 30 years of civic mistakes. Their elected leaders’ disastrous acquisition of a decrepit Ash Street office tower. Their pension underfunding follies. Their legally doomed ballot measure to end pensions for most new hires. Their “Smart Streetlights” program that was later revealed to be a mass surveillance system. Or this year’s batty decision to pay up to $4.5 million to get a consultant’s recommendations on what to charge for trash pickup and recycling services, among the most mundane civic issues imaginable.

Given this history, doubts about setting up a municipal utility weren’t just likely. They were mandatory. Better safe than sorry.