NOT IN MY HOUSE
Source: Politico
NOT IN MY HOUSE: Californians are mad as hell about their utility bills, and lawmakers know it.
But their efforts to micromanage state agencies’ handling of water and electricity rates are falling flat.
Lawmakers came in hot this session after hearing from constituents about Pacific Gas and Electric rate hikes that the California Public Utilities Commission approved late last year. About 20 legislators signed on to Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin’s AB 1999, which would halt a CPUC proceeding to restructure electric bills around a fixed monthly fee.
Constituents flooded the phones in support — Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas’ office even recorded a new greeting on its public line earlier today directing the bill’s backers to press 1, according to Jennifer Tanner, founder of Indivisible California Green Team, a climate advocacy group that has urged people to call in.
But Rivas resisted the pressure and kept the bill from being heard today, dooming it ahead of Friday’s deadline for bills to clear policy committees in their house of origin. A spokesperson said Rivas believes the CPUC’s proposal to add $24 to most customers’ bills — unveiled in March, after Irwin’s bill — will save customers money, not cost them more.
“The Speaker appreciates his colleague’s legislative scrutiny of the PUC and the governor’s plan, and as a result believes it is no longer necessary to move AB 1999 forward in its current form,” his spokesperson Cynthia Moreno said in an email. “Conversations with the author continue regarding amendments, including assurances that any changes in the fixed charge are revenue neutral for utilities and not a means to increase their profits.”
Lawmakers were also thwarted yesterday in trying to weaken the State Water Resources Control Board’s water-saving targets for urban water agencies. Sen. Angelique Ashby’s SB 1110 would have let agencies demonstrate better water supply management as a way to meet the targets. She narrowed it to just delay the targets by two years.
“We can only be as brave for our constituents as the system allows us to be,” the Sacramento-area Democrat said at Tuesday’s Senate Natural Resources and Water Committee hearing.
The salvos against state agencies are especially striking given that it was lawmakers who originally tasked the agencies with tightening water conservation and restructuring electricity bills, both moves that would increase bills in some cases.
On one level, the tension between lawmakers and the executive branch — an eternal theme in Sacramento’s single-party policymaking apparatus — is about where authority should lie.
“The CPUC needs direction,” Assemblymember Tasha Boerner said during a discussion on electric rates at today’s Utilities and Energy Committee meeting. “If we don’t give them direction, they’re not going to do what they should be doing for our ratepayers.”
On another, it’s about political liability. Elected officials are more vulnerable to political winds than appointed regulators — and more likely to get cold feet when the consequences hit.
“I believe legislators have their ear closer to the ground and are more able to determine what the public and the ratepayers are seeing and experiencing and their direction,” said former state Sen. Jerry Hill, who called for the CPUC president’s resignation in the wake of PG&E’s 2010 gas pipeline explosion that killed eight in San Bruno.
Some lawmakers with feet in both the regulatory and legislative worlds want to go easier on the agencies.
“In some cases, legislators want to re-litigate the underlying legislation,” said Sen. John Laird, who served as Natural Resources Secretary under former Gov. Jerry Brown, in an interview. “It always needs to be given a chance to work and to run its process. You can’t do oversight for something that isn’t final or a program that hasn’t even started.”
You can expect more legislative intervention: Sen. Josh Becker’s SB 1374, which targets a recent CPUC decision limiting solar incentives for schools, apartments and farms, cleared policy committees this week following a vigorous discussion over ratepayer impacts. — WV, CvK