The political pressure on Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Legislature and the California Public Utilities Commission to break up Pacific Gas & Electric has grown rapidly since PG&E ordered power outages from Oct. 9-12 that affected more than 2 million people in response to the fire threat posed by heavy winds.

The utility began another planned outage Wednesday that affected 178,000 homes and businesses — once again saying it had no choice because gusty winds could cause its infrastructure to spark fast-moving wildfires.

But the idea that one of the great wealth-producing regions in the world can’t keep the lights on infuriated many in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said his city was interested in buying all or part of PG&E and turning it into a municipal utility. “I’ve seen better-organized riots,” Liccardo said of PG&E’s preparations for the Oct. 9-12 outages.

San Francisco has sought parts of PG&E for months. On Oct. 9, Mayor London Breed offered PG&E $2.5 billion for its energy infrastructure serving her city. The utility rejected the offer.

Meanwhile, Newsom’s Oct. 14 call for PG&E to provide residential customers affected by the Oct. 9-12 outage a credit or rebate of $100 and small businesses $250 was rejected Tuesday by the utility. This was seen as an effort by the governor not just to get PG&E to pay for the mass inconvenience it had caused but to create an economic disincentive to the utility imposing outages even when fire risks were only moderate.

Will Newsom drop support for PG&E getting out of bankruptcy?

Newsom is in a difficult situation that could lead him to abandon his support for PG&E emerging from its Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which was declared in January after the utility acknowledged it faced $30 billion or more in wildfire liabilities. The utility must do so by July 2020 to be eligible for a $26 billion wildfire relief fund the Legislature passed this summer to help utilities deal with the massive cost of fires. 

As recently as November 2018, support for PG&E among state lawmakers was significant enough that Assemblyman Chris Holden, D-Pasadena, told reporters he would carry a bill to protect the utility from wildfire liabilities. But such support is no longer evident in the Capitol. Newsom’s recent descriptions of PG&E as greedy, incompetent and untrustworthy resemble the longtime rhetoric of the utility’s harshest critics, such as state Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo.

Pundits from several state newspapers and news websites have speculated that Newsom’s political future depends on how he handles the PG&E crisis. They noted that Gov. Gray Davis was so hurt by rolling blackouts in the winter of 2000-2001 that a Republican-led effort to replace him in 2003 rapidly caught fire and culminated with Arnold Schwarzenegger replacing Davis.

“I’ve seen this movie before,’’ Garry South, a Democratic strategist and a top aide to Gov. Davis, told Politico California.

But even if Newsom deftly handles the PG&E matter, he could still face blowback over what some experts expect to be a series of big increases in power bills from utilities overwhelmed by the cost of wildfires and of preparing for them in an era of hot, dry conditions. California’s rates are already 50 percent higher than the national average, according to data from August.

As South told Politico, Californians may not have had cause to blame Gov. Davis for the 2000-2001 blackouts. But when bad things happened that affected the basics of modern life, they blamed the person in charge, he said. 

For the second year in a row, a sweeping police reform measure that law-enforcement organizations said was motivated by antipathy toward peace officers has been embraced by the state Legislature.

Last year lawmakers passed Senate Bill 1421 by Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley. It required police agencies to release information on officer discipline records – treating these records the same as many others that are routinely released to the public under government openness laws. California’s police disclosure rules previously had been among the strictest in the nation.

This year, Assembly Bill 392, by Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, appears headed for passage after being approved 67-0 by the Assembly on Wednesday. It says officers may only use lethal force if it is “necessary” for public safety. Existing law says officers can use such force if they believe it is “reasonable” to ensure public safety. While provisions in Assembly Bill 392 were dropped to persuade law enforcement organizations to end their opposition and take a neutral stand – as they did last week – the ACLU says the bill will create among the strictest use-of-force standards of any state.

These organizations were lobbied by Gov. Gavin Newsom to accept Assembly Bill 392. After their decision to go neutral was announced, Newsom, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon and Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins issued a joint statement endorsing Weber’s bill, seemingly guaranteeing its eventual approval.

The passage of the two reform measures would have been impossible to imagine earlier this century. Law enforcement unions had tight relationships with most elected Democrats, the same as with unions for teachers, nurses, service workers and government bureaucrats, providing them with heavy campaign contributions.

Gov. Gray Davis’ 2001 decision to give prison guards a five-year, 37 percent raise after its union helped him get elected in 1998 drew sharp blow-back from good-government advocates and newspaper editorial boards, especially after the 2003 revelation that Davis had badly underestimated the long-term cost of the labor deal. It was among the issues that helped lead to his unprecedented recall later that year.

2004 CHP scandal downplayed by state leaders

But the clout of law enforcement was again on display a year later. In 2004, the Sacramento Bee broke the story of a pervasive workers’ compensation scam in the upper reaches of the California Highway Patrol. The Bee found that 55 of the 65 senior CHP officers who had retired since 2000 had filed workers’ comp claims – with some citing injuries never reported while they were on the job. Their disability claims were routinely approved, sharply increasing their retirement benefits.

CHP Commissioner Dwight “Spike” Helmick agreed to retire after the “Chiefs Disease” scandal broke, then added to it by also claiming he was disabled because of vehicle accidents in the 1970s and 1980s. But neither the Legislature or Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger – who courted and won law enforcement support – agreed with calls to bring in an outside reformer to run the agency. Instead, Schwarzenegger chose Mike Brown, one of Helmick’s top aides.

Attorney General Bill Lockyer declined to prosecute the case, citing conflicts of interest because of his office’s close ties to the CHP. The case was assigned to Sacramento County District Attorney Jan Scully. But in 2007, she closed the investigation without bringing any charges. Scully said CHP officials and former officials were “unable or unwilling” to testify about the pension-spiking scheme. The story faded from the headlines.

But ties between lawmakers and police unions have weakened since then as the national outcry has grown over alleged police mistreatment of minorities, especially a series of fatal shootings of young African-American men in questionable circumstances. The California Democratic Party has also had an influx of newly elected progressive lawmakers who dislike the aggressive, confrontational policing style adopted by many departments after it was credited with reducing crime in New York City in the 1990s under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Recent analyses of how Assembly Bill 392 overcame the obstacles that doomed a similar bill last year have focused on the March 2018 fatal shooting of Stephon Clark, an unarmed black father of two, in Sacramento.

The announcement two months ago that no officer would face charges for Clark’s death triggered an outcry so intense it became a national and international story that appeared to give Weber’s bill new momentum.

This price system, critics say, results in unforeseen consequences. A recent investigative report found that California’s utility companies have been involved in a power-plant building spree, even though Californians have significantly cut their electricity usage over the same time period. In three years, the state is projected to be producing 21 percent more electricity than it needs, without counting the growth in rooftop-solar applications, reported the Los Angeles Times.

Last year, the California Independent System Operator had 24 percent in actual reserves – far above the targeted 15 percent goal. Even that 15 percent goal is 50 percent higher than what’s necessary to protect the system from disaster and blackouts, according to some experts.

As the Times’ report put it, “California has a big – and growing – glut of power.” It’s a matter of incentives. Because utilities are guaranteed a 10.5 percent rate of return on each new plant they build, regardless of whether customers actually need it, they can make more money building new plants than they could buying power from existing competing plants.

In an open marketplace, gluts of products or services lead firms to slash their prices dramatically. If, say, car manufacturers produce too many vehicles, they will provide rebates or be stuck with lots full of unsold inventory. With California’s regulated utility system, by contrast, gluts in electricity actually raise prices for consumers because of the way utilities are paid for their investments. They need only get the approval from the Public Utilities Commission to build new plants and pass on costs to ratepayers.

The regulated utility model, which dates back to the 19^th century, puts government regulators in charge of looking after consumers’ best interests. But a fairly recent California utility scandal has illustrated the dangers of what Nobel Prize laureate George Stigler refers to as “regulatory capture,” when the oversight agencies are dominated by the industries they regulate.

As the Mercury News reported in 2015 regarding the investigation of a deadly 2010 explosion of a PG&E natural-gas pipeline in San Bruno:

“Additional evidence of the close relationship between PG&E officials and leaders of the agency that regulates the utility emerged late Friday in a new batch of emails long sought by the city of San Bruno … .”

Some say the current system also crushes the emergence of a functioning electricity market. The Times article tells the story of an energy company that built a $300 million privately funded facility in Sutter County:

“Independents like Calpine don’t have a captive audience of residential customers like regulated utilities do. Instead, they sell their electricity under contract or into the electricity market, and make money only if they can find customers for their power.”

But soon after the construction of that plant, the California Public Utilities Commission approved PG&E’s application to build its own power plant. PG&E gets paid no matter the consumer demand, so it was hard for a true private enterprise to compete with that subsidized model. Calpine shuttered its facility halfway into its useful life.

“A monopoly franchise removes the incentive to innovate to increase market share,” explains my R Street Institute colleague Devin Hartman, in an August study of the nation’s electricity markets. “Guaranteed cost recovery for ‘prudently incurred’ expenses diminishes the incentive to control costs. The regulated model also insulates utilities from market risks and most policy risks, such as changes in fuel prices or government subsidies.” This provides a safe place for investors, he added, but gives them little incentive to manage risks or control costs.

These analyses also highlight a point that might seem counterintuitive to many environmentalists: competitive markets often lead to better air-quality outcomes. Here, we see utilities overbuilding natural-gas-fired power plants even as consumer demand suggests the plants aren’t necessary. Because of the utilities’ rate-of-return-based payment, they can stick with older technologies and avoid looking at alternative-energy models that might trim their costs.

The current distorted market is, to some degree, a reaction to the botched energy deregulation plan former Gov. Pete Wilson signed into law in 1996, which provoked a statewide crisis in 2000. The state deregulated the price of wholesale energy, but capped its retail price. The population had been growing and regulators had not approved the construction of new power plants for years. After a hot summer and market manipulations by energy companies gaming the new system, the state’s wholesale prices soared above those retail caps.

The end result: Rolling electricity blackouts, a statewide crisis that led to the bankruptcy of PG&E, and the recall of Gov. Gray Davis. Though Wilson signed the legislation, Davis was blamed for indecision as parts of the state went dark. Since then, state officials have avoided anything smacking of deregulation or market competition and have been cranking up supply even if it’s not necessary. Other states, such as Texas, deregulated their electricity markets and have watched electricity prices go down as California’s have increased.

The Times only touches on another issue of long-term importance: solar energy and the utility companies’ fear of a “death spiral.” California law allows for net energy metering. “Customers who install small solar, wind, biogas and fuel cell generation facilities … to serve all or a portion of onsite electricity needs are eligible for the state’s net metering program,” explains the Public Utilities Commission. “NEM allows a customer-generator to receive a financial credit for power generated by their onsite system and fed back to the utility.”

Utilities must buy back the electricity at market rates, but they still have this vast – and growing – infrastructure of power plants and utility lines to finance and maintain. The more the utilities raise their rates to pay for these “stranded costs,” the more consumers opt out and install solar panels. That raises the per-capita costs of maintaining that infrastructure, which raises electricity prices – and leads to more people opting out of the system. Advances in battery storage could further diminish the need for power plants that are financed 30 or 40 years into the future.

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.     

A measure backed by the California Teachers Association would extend Prop. 30’s higher tax rates on the wealthiest Californians until 2030, with an estimated $7.5 billion each year going to public schools and community colleges.

 

Another measure, this one by the California Hospital Association and the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, makes those higher tax rates permanent and sends half the annual estimated $10 billion to public schools, colleges and universities, 40 percent to Medi-Cal for low-income health care and 10 percent for early childhood development programs. It also imposes a new, higher tax rate on those who make more than $1 million annually. …

 

[Negotiators] for the teachers group and the hospital association have been talking about a third option, which would extend Prop. 30’s higher tax rates and split the money between schools and health programs. That measure is awaiting approval from the state Attorney General’s Office, and a decision about whether to aim that initiative for the ballot won’t be made until later this month. …

 

“We’d prefer one measure, especially on a crowded ballot,” said Gale Kaufman, a political consultant working on the teachers’ measure. “My instincts say less is better always, but it’s difficult to have any hard and fast rules.”

The focus isn’t just on income tax ballot measures, though they have gotten the most early attention. The Chronicle notes that the Making Poverty History initiative “would add a surcharge to the tax bill for land and buildings with an assessed value of $3 million or more. The $6 billion raised annually would go toward programs to reduce poverty in the state, including prenatal services, expanded child care, tax credits and job training grants.”

Steyer follows Schwarzenegger strategy

Tom Steyer, the billionaire environmentalist who is exploring a 2018 run for governor, also is looking to make a political name for himself with a ballot measure, as Arnold Schwarzenegger did in 2002 with Proposition 49, a successful ballot measure funding after-school programs, a year before the recall election that ousted Gov. Gray Davis.

Steyer is behind the Save Lives California campaign, which would use a $2-a-pack tax on cigarettes to shore up state Medi-Cal funding and to pay for health-promotion and anti-smoking programs.

A previous ballot measure that successfully raised cigarette taxes was also sponsored by a non-politician believed to be interested in running for governor. Championed by Hollywood producer-director-actor Rob Reiner, Proposition 10 added a 50-cent levy on a pack of cigarettes, with proceeds used mostly to fund early childhood education programs.

But Reiner, unlike Schwarzenegger, never ran for state office.

But instead of taking a muted approach in response — or attempting to work out some reforms behind the scenes — the California Correctional Peace Officers Association is gearing up for war, admitting nothing and saying the improprieties were on the part of investigators, not guards.

This is from Associated Press:

Inspector General Robert Barton said the California Correctional Peace Officers Association advised members not to cooperate and filed a lawsuit and collective bargaining grievance in a bid to hinder the investigation.

 

The union sent a letter last month to Gov. Jerry Brown and every state lawmaker in what Barton called “the latest strong-arm tactic” to obstruct the investigation and discredit the inspector general before the report was released.

 

Union President Chuck Alexander’s letter to Brown accuses Barton of taking a prosecutorial “burn a cop a week” approach to overseeing the corrections department. Union spokeswoman Nichol Gomez-Pryde said the union’s only interest is in protecting its members’ legal rights.

 

The report came more than a decade after the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation tried to stamp out a culture in which prison guards protect one another when they witness wrongdoing.

CCPOA’s hardball tactics reminiscent of Gray Davis era

The stance taken by the CCPOA was remindful of its tactics and attitude during Gray Davis’ nearly five-year run as governor. The prison guards union won a 2002 contract that not only provided big raises — 37 percent over five years for many union members — it also gave union officials a say in management. At a remarkable July 2003 Sacramento hearing, lawmakers heard testimony about how this made it difficult to prevent, much less punish, outrageous guard behavior similar to what’s being alleged at the High Desert prison. The San Francisco Chronicle reported at the time:

On Thursday, eight witnesses shared their versions of a controversy that began at the California Institution for Men in Chino (San Bernardino County) on May 9, 2002. In an alleged incident that included as many as 20 guards, some participating and some watching, five prisoners whose hands and feet were bound were slammed to the ground, beaten and kicked.

 

Internal affairs agents for the corrections system launched a criminal investigation, according to Special Agent Richard Feaster. A recording of an informant provided especially damning evidence, agents said Thursday. … But the probe quickly ran into trouble.

 

Using a clause in their contract with the state, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association began demanding that agents share the evidence being amassed against guards. Agents were concerned that the case would be compromised if union officials learned who key witnesses were.

 

The contract the CCPOA signed with Davis …  includes many … provisions, including allowing guards to obtain information being collected against them.

Schwarzenegger demanded, won concessions

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who succeeded Davis in the fall 2003 recall, fought the CCPOA tooth and nail and won back some of the concessions that Davis had made. This led the union to consider mounting a recall attempt against Schwarzenegger in 2007, but it eventually gave up.

In 2010, the CCPOA endorsed Jerry Brown for governor and was rewarded with a 2011 contract that prompted complaints from a Long Beach Press-Telegram editorial:

Brown’s deal reverses some reforms that were made under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, such as the requirement that guards meet physical fitness standards and that allows managers to take action against sick time abuse. To top it off, the deal includes a pay increase.

The recent state inspector general’s report came shortly after Jeffrey Beard announced he was resigning Jan. 1 as secretary of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The former Pennsylvania prison official was brought in by Brown three years ago to shake up a dysfunctional culture, and he got high marks from the governor.

But Beard’s departure won’t be tidy, coming against a backdrop of the ugly fight playing out at the High Desert prison. Brown — like Davis, his former chief of staff — and his next prison boss will have to figure out how to treat a union that resists boundaries on its behavior.

Senate Bill 8 would change the tax code to reduce the reliance on topsy-turvy income tax revenues by adding taxes on services and reducing them on personal income. Here’s a description of it from the LegInfo official site:

California’s two trillion dollar economy has shifted from being mainly agricultural and manufacturing in the 1950s and 1960s, when the framework of today’s tax system was set, to one based on information and services, which now accounts for 80 percent of all economic activities in the state. To achieve a future as promising as California’s past, we need a tax system that is based on this real economy of the 21st century while ensuring that new revenue is invested in strengthening the ladder of mobility for all our residents.

The second, SB155, would better integrate California into the Western region’s electrical grid to promote a more resilient system and show how California’s embrace of more renewable sources of energy can be emulated by other states. There’s no bill analysis available, but the intent is to offer up the Golden State as both a model and a partner for states considering more ambitious renewable mandates.

But the twist is that while Hertzberg’s bills are broadly lauded by an East Coast group, in Sacramento they barely made a wave. Neither has ever been voted on, even at the committee level.

Refining tax code proposed — and rejected — before

It’s not clear why other Democrats in the Legislature are cool to SB155. But the central ideas driving SB8 — that we have an outmoded state tax code that poorly serves residents and the business community — have been around for years. They were the driving force behind a 2009 report issued by the Commission on the 21st Century Economy, a panel set up Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger whose supporters included both Republican luminaries (former Treasury Secretary George Shultz) and Democratic ones (former Gov. Gray Davis).

The report proposed what commission chairman Gerald Parsky called the world’s first tax code specifically designed to promote economic growth; one that reduced many current taxes while imposing new taxes on a wide range of services. Parsky, a Rancho Santa Fee businessman and high-profile behind-the-scenes Republican player, predicted it would lead to a broad California economic boom even without the regulatory reform that business groups have long wanted.

The private Think Long Committee for California, with a more liberal pedigree, made similar recommendations in 2011. The committee chairman, billionaire businessman Nicolas Berggruen, predicted a smart tax code could yield a wave of vast new funding for K-12 and higher education.

Neither got anywhere. Democrats objected to lowering income taxes on the wealthy, while Republicans objected to adding big new areas of commerce for government to tax.

Hertzberg appears to be finding the same resistance.

Mayor Ed Lee and the San Francisco Unified School District announced Wednesday they plan to build a 100-unit housing complex solely for public school teachers and paraprofessionals, and invest up to $44 million over the next five years to help them purchase homes.

 

The proposals seek to help the many teachers and teaching assistants in San Francisco who say untenable housing prices have made it impossible for them to live in the city.

 

“Providing this housing opportunity for our teachers is one of the most important things we can do as a city,” Board of Supervisors President London Breed said in the mayor’s office Wednesday. She added that she was “really a bad kid in school” and the teachers who helped children like her “deserve an opportunity to live in this great city.”

 

The plan for a teachers-only housing complex is in its nascent stages. City and school officials said it will be constructed on property already owned by the school district, although they wouldn’t identify what sites are under consideration. They also haven’t determined who would qualify for the housing.

In May, Los Angeles Unified announced similar plans. This is from the LA Weekly:

The Los Angeles Unified School District [has a] 66-unit, four-story Selma Community Workforce Housing Project under construction at North Cherokee and Selma avenues in Hollywood and is scheduled to open in fall of 2016, the district says. It’s “intended for L.A. Unified employees who fall into a designated economic category. The complex is part of the District’s ambitious effort to attract and retain staff who want to live near work but can’t afford to pay for housing costs.”

Gov. Davis won tax break for teachers

This isn’t the first time that teachers in California have been singled out for special treatment. In 200o, Gov. Gray Davis sought to exempt teachers from the state income tax, a proposal that quickly faced strong opposition. He ended up signing a far more modest measure that gave teachers a tax credit of up to $1,500 for out-of-pocket classroom expenses.

Given that the average teacher pay in California is nearly $70,000, it seems possible that opposition could build to singling out a group with middle-class pay for special treatment in a state in which 23 percent of residents are in poverty. But San Francisco officials sought to blunt such concerns by framing the policy as being crucial to attract and retain teachers.

The Golden State’s struggle to keep the lights on in winter 2000-01 produced a political crisis for Gov. Gray Davis. His response was signing a long-term deal in March 2001 with out-of-state suppliers that committed the state to spend $43 billion for power at the rate of 8 cents per kilowatt hour. Economists instantly criticized the deal as unnecessarily costly and lengthy — an overreaction to unusual circumstances. This ended up proving conventional wisdom and was a contributing factor to the public anger with Davis that led to his October 2003 recall election.

In a few years time, will the conventional wisdom about another bold state energy policy — the huge long-term commitment to massive alternative-energy plants — be similarly negative? Given how rapidly the solar-energy picture is changing, it seems quite possible.

‘Obsolence’ for traditional electric utilities?

The world’s largest solar-power plant, the 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight project, opened in February near Joshua Tree National Park. Three even bigger projects have won approval from state regulators and are progressing toward completion, as well as several smaller plants.

But these industrial solar projects might not even be needed if the “distributed solar” boom, in which homes and businesses generate power with their own panels, continues. As the cost of photovoltaic panels comes down — they’re now 60 percent cheaper than in 2010 — reliance on utilities for electricity keeps dropping. And if Tesla’s promised breakthrough on home batteries to store surplus energy comes to pass, the basics of electricity will change in much of America. Utilities would face enormous problems paying off their long-term sunken costs.

Most of the coverage of utilities’ opposition to distributed solar has focused on their criticism of requirements that they buy surplus power from individual homes or businesses at favorable rates that don’t help utilities pay for the cost of maintaining their energy transmission grids.

But in March, The Washington Post obtained and reported on a private presentation made to the nation’s utility companies in 2012 by an executive for the Edison Electric Institute, the trade association representing all investor-owner electricity generators in the U.S. It depicted the problems posed by the rise of distributed solar power in much starker fashion:

Three years ago, the nation’s top utility executives gathered at a Colorado resort to hear warnings about a grave new threat to operators of America’s electric grid: not superstorms or cyberattacks, but rooftop solar panels.

 

If demand for residential solar continued to soar, traditional utilities could soon face serious problems, from “declining retail sales” and a “loss of customers” to “potential obsolescence,” according to a presentation prepared for the group. “Industry must prepare an action plan to address the challenges,” it said.

 

The warning, delivered to a private meeting of the utility industry’s main trade association, became a call to arms for electricity providers in nearly every corner of the nation. Three years later, the industry and its fossil-fuel supporters are waging a determined campaign to stop a home-solar insurgency that is rattling the boardrooms of the country’s government-regulated electric monopolies.

CA forced utilities to make costly investments

The Post article noted that utilities were making relatively little progress in encouraging state legislatures to obstruct rooftop solar’s rise but some progress in getting utility regulators to accept their agenda of self-preservation.

In California, however, rooftop-solar advocates are so powerful that it seems extremely unlikely that the Public Utilities Commission would impose fees and surtaxes on rooftop solar, as regulators have done in Arizona and Wisconsin.

On the other hand, the PUC has shown deep concern for helping investor-owned utilities keep a healthy bottom line. The shuttering of the San Onofre nuclear power is going to cost $4.7 billion. But PUC officials secretly negotiated a deal in which San Onofre’s majority owner (Edison International) and its minority owner (San Diego Gas & Electric) must only pay $1.4 billion — with the utilities’ ratepayers picking up the remaining $3.3 billion in coming years.

This has rankled ratepayers and watchdogs alike, since a case can be made that better management at San Onofre would have identified the problems with defective Mitsubishi steam generators at the plant that led to its closure.

The PUC could in coming years face similar questions of how to divvy up the multibillion-dollar costs of the construction of giant solar plants in the state’s southeast corner — if they are no longer needed to operate at full capacity, or at all.

That could be a thornier question for the PUC than San Onofre, however. Edison, SDG&E and Pacific Gas & Electric could say they committed to the massive solar plants under legal and political pressure because of laws like AB32 and ardently green governors like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown.

That pressure — and how it was applied with PUC dictates — could end up being another chapter in the yet-to-be-written biography of Michael Peevey, whose 2002-2014 stint as president of the commission ended in a maze of controversies over his close ties to utilities.

Wilson argued that the reason California had both the highest taxes and the highest poverty rates in the country is because decisions by the Legislature made it difficult to create jobs. The former Republican governor said that excessive regulation was driving jobs away from California, particularly the application of CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act, when used to thwart projects that would create jobs.

He also criticized AB32, the Global Warming Solution Act, saying California employers have to meet standards no employers in other states have to meet. He predicted that the state would fall from its ranking as the eighth largest economy in the world because of the energy cost increases that will result from AB32. In answer to a question by panel moderator Jim Newton, former Los Angeles Times editor and columnist, Wilson said he would roll back the provisions of AB32.

Governor Davis, a Democrat, said excessive regulation was a problem but that there was nothing wrong with laws like AB32 or CEQA, which he supported. He reminded the Town Hall Los Angeles audience that Gov. Ronald Reagan had signed CEQA into law. On the other hand, he acknowledged some problems with the law relaying a story about a project that would create 70,000 jobs but was tied up in litigation for five years because of a CEQA inspired lawsuit. He said this type of CEQA use would scare off investors.

Saying “life is a balance,” Davis argued that California was not standing alone in battling climate change, pointing to other states and Canadian provinces that had taken steps in that direction. He suggested the CEQA law be tweaked and refined.

To which Wilson countered, he sees no tweaks coming out of the Legislature.

Both Wilson and Davis defended Governor Jerry Brown’s position on water cutbacks, which generally left farmers untouched by the new mandated cuts. Both former governors said the farmers have suffered much already with the ongoing drought. Davis argued for more use of recycled water; Wilson better water storage facilities.

Wilson was challenged by a question from the audience if he reconsidered his position on Proposition 187 to deny services to illegal immigrants.

Wilson responded that Proposition 187 of 1994 was a cry from taxpayers who felt overwhelmed by cost and safety issues tied to the immigrants in the country illegally. He said 20 percent of the state’s prisoners at the time were illegal immigrants and a 18-fold increase in health care costs and education cost increases were the result of the immigration. That’s what inspired Prop. 187, he said. He blamed “two capitols”: Washington D.C. and Mexico City for ignoring responsibility for the border.

He did not blame the immigrants, however. Wilson said, “People below the border did what I would have done in their shoes.”

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.