Two months before Californians go to the polls to choose a governor, the state’s top elections official tearfully acknowledged Friday that she has been consumed by a “debilitating” depression that has often kept her away from the office.

Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who oversees statewide voting, told The Times that she has a history of depression and has moved out of the two-story country home she owns with her husband. She now resides in a trailer park on the outskirts of Sacramento. …

The secretary said she is receiving professional help, is comforted by support from friends and has not been hospitalized. She described her new living accommodations as a refuge, characterizing the mobile home park as one containing “extended-stay cottages.” …

Her trailer at Arden Acres has cracked windowsills, and some windows have cardboard behind the glass to block the sun. Behind it is a storage yard with a giant, rusting shipping container pressed against the other side of the fence. On Thursday, her state-issued Buick was parked outside, the back seats and front passenger seat full of cardboard boxes brimming with clothing and household goods.

Problems festered, never got solved

This may fully or partly explain her utter diffidence as secretary of state over the past seven and a half years. As the LAT story noted …

She has been criticized periodically for being distracted on the job, most recently during her 2010 reelection campaign. Republican challenger Damon Dunn noted then that the time it took her office to process business filings had more than tripled. (Bowen said a backlog was due to budget cuts.)

In addition, a project that now allows online voter registration was four years behind schedule. Bowen had said it takes time to find the right contractor.

Open-government advocates bashed her for failing to upgrade California’s online campaign finance reporting system, which is antiquated and unwieldy.

‘Embarrassing shortcomings and backlogs’

Her years of disinterest in trying to minimize business paperwork delays produced a harsh rebuke from the Sac Bee edit page in March 2013:

If Texas can process an application to form a limited liability company in five days, even less if the registration application is filed online, why does it take California six weeks? In California, home to Silicon Valley, the most sophisticated collection of high-tech companies in the world, why can’t the state process business filings online?

Why does a business owner in Los Angeles have to deliver papers to the secretary of state’s office in Sacramento to get expedited over-the-counter service? Why doesn’t the secretary of state have counter service in Los Angeles or Fresno or San Francisco?

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen blames state budget cuts for the many embarrassing shortcomings and backlogs in her office. Lack of money should not have been a problem. After all, the business portal side of Bowen’s office – the place where entrepreneurs seeking to form corporations or limited liability companies or partnerships file their paperwork – is entirely fee-based. It’s supposed to be self-supporting. The businesses pay for the cost of the operation.

In fact, California charges among the highest fees of any state in the nation for what appears to be perhaps the worst service, as a limited survey by The Bee’s Jon Ortiz suggests.

I sure didn’t see this coming. In 2006, I voted for Bowen over appointed Republican Secretary of State Bruce McPherson after being put off by McPherson’s hauteur and arrogance in an interview.

Mature, persistent leadership during energy crisis

It wasn’t just McPherson’s manner. I also was impressed by Bowen’s persistence, patience and maturity during the state’s bizarre 2000-01 energy crisis, the fiasco that so damaged then-Gov. Gray Davis that it paved the way for his 2003 recall. Bowen, a Redondo Beach Democrat, was chair of the state Senate’s Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee. In early 2000, after hearings by her committee, she warned that California’s faux energy dergulation bill of 1996 was going haywire.

But Davis was more interested in posturing and blaming utilities and power suppliers than acting decisively to address both soaring energy costs and supply limits that produced regional blackouts. He was such a dithering dolt that in December 2000, 75-year-old former Secretary of State Warren Christopher — an Edison board member — harangued him at a private meeting about needing to figure out the basics of public leadership.

Bowen played an important role in the cleanup, especially when she resisted attempts to rush through a flawed fix. As she noted, it was the rush to pass the faux deregulation bill in 1996 that created the mess.

I wasn’t just observing from afar. I was then a government and politics reporter for The Orange County Register, which sent me to Sacramento in late January and early Februrary 2001 to bolster our coverage as the crisis crested. In a Capitol dominated by a dilettante (Davis) and a wack job (Senate President John Burton), Bowen stood out.

Based on her performance in the Legislature, I never expected her to disappear after she got a promotion. But that’s pretty much what happened.

Missing-person report: SOS for the SoS

In May, when I met Pete Peterson, the brainy, impressive GOP reformer who hopes to succeed Bowen in November’s election, I told him how surprised I was that Bowen was such a fiasco in statewide office. I said someone should file a missing person report for the secretary of state.

Peterson laughed, and so did I. But I wouldn’t tell such a joke now. I hope Bowen gets the help she needs — and that California finally gets the great secretary of state that it needs and deserves.

Peterson could be that good. He’s already won a long list of endorsements from newspapers left and right. Don’t hold the LAT’s applause against him.

By Katy Grimes

With industrial electricity rates 88 percent higher in California than in Texas last year, the news that the San Onofre nuclear plant in is not going to be restarted is just more evidence of a government created energy crisis in the making.

Due to  political pressure from Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-CA for the closure of one of California’s largest power plants,  a shortage of electricity is expected, power producers agree. But they claim they can handle it. At what cost?

It is 108 degrees in Sacramento today. If this is a sign of the summer ahead, a shortage of electricity is not good news.

And it’s even tougher to take knowing my $300-a-month California electricity bill would be $61  in Texas.

Gov. Jerry Brown wants us to practice conservation measures. Could this be a Gray Davis redux? “The governor also is urging continued conservation of electricity as the hot summer months approach,” Sacramento’s News10 reported.

“Steve Berberich of the California Independent System Operator, which runs the state’s transmission grid, said pockets of Southern California will likely be subjected to conservation alerts this summer as the demand for electricity grows,” the Sacramento Bee reported.

“‘It will be tight – we will have to have conservation messages out there,’ said Berberich, the ISO’s chief executive. ‘If we ask for conservation, we need (consumers) to respond.’ Gov. Jerry Brown issued his own call for conservation.”

California politicians created the problem the last time, and they can do it again.

California’s No-Nukes Act

“The Nuclear Waste Act of 2012” was a ballot proposal which would immediately have prohibited the generation of nuclear power in the state, including by existing power plants. Fortunately, the initiative did not make it to the ballot. But that is the mindset of the party in political power in California.

The authors of the nuclear waste act claimed the Legislative Analyst’s Office’s fiscal analysis for the initiative was false and misleading, and prejudiced voters against signing our petition. They sued and tok the case all the way to the California Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case.

The last electricity crisis

The 2000-2001 California electricity crisis was caused by market and price manipulations, delays in approval of new power plants, and capped retail electricity prices.The state suffered from large-scale rolling blackouts. one of the state’s largest energy companies collapsed, and the economic fall-out led to the historic recall election of then Governor Gray Davis.

“California has a new energy crisis,” Forbes reported last month. “It’s not about power marketers manipulating electricity prices. And it’s not about oil spilling into the Pacific Ocean. It’s about the future of the long-standing nuclear facility in Southern California and whether the 1.4 million homes that it services will feel the effects of its shutdown.”

It takes double the power to replace the nuclear power by renewable and conventional energy. Most nuclear plants calculate 1000 Megawatts of power generates electricity to one million homes.

The California Legislative Analyst addressed the very real problem of what to replace nuclear power with, in their analysis of the 2012 proposed ballot initiative. “The state’s electricity authorities have stated that it would take many years to replace the electricity generating capacity of the two nuclear plants due to the current complexity of siting power plants and transmission lines.”

The two nuclear plants referred to by the LAO are The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, located in San Luis Obispo and owned by PG&E, and the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, mainly owned by Southern California Edison in San Diego County.

“These two plants produce enough electricity to power more than 6 million homes — nearly 10,000 megawatts of of power,” I wrote in 2012. “The cost of power generation to replace clean nuclear power would be more than double what nuclear power costs. This is because renewable energy only produces intermittently, and needs double the amount of conventional or nuclear energy produced in order to address the intermittency issue. In addition to needing more renewable energy to power the same number of homes, wind and solar still need conventionally produced energy as backup.”

It would take more than 20,000 MegaWatts of conventional energy to replace the nuclear power generated by the two nuclear plants in the state —  if additional conventional power plants could even be built.

Although the radiation isotopes must be contained, nuclear power only generates steam; there are no greenhouse gas emissions produced, which is why it is considered clean energy. Renewable energy is far more expensive to produce than nuclear, and unreliable as a primary energy source, according to the energy expert.

What now?

How is this going to impact the cost of power? Increases are inevitable. It’s not going to be pretty.

Texas has electricity deregulation, which is the direction California should be headed. But don’t hold your breath with the governor urging conservation measures.