SAN FRANCISCO — A group of California cities and municipal utilities filed suit last week seeking to disqualify a ballot measure designed to erect barriers to publicly owned electricity providers.
The measure, Proposition 16 on the statewide June 8 primary ballot, would impose a new requirement for public utilities to secure a two-thirds vote in a ballot measure to provide electricity to new customers or establish a community choice electricity program “using public funds or bonds.”
The signature-gathering campaign that placed the measure on the ballot was financed lock, stock, and barrel by Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the dominant investor-owned utility in the northern half of California.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in Superior Court in Sacramento, seeks a court order to disqualify the measure from the ballot for being false and misleading, and for “concealing its true nature and purpose from voters,” according to the news release announcing the suit.
The suit lists nine cities and utility districts as plaintiffs, including San Francisco, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, and the Modesto Irrigation District, as well as the California Municipal Utilities Association.
Not only would the ballot measure have the intended impact of making it harder for public utilities to expand into new territory, it is likely to create additional problems for such utilities seeking to serve new customers in their own territory, opponents say.
“Public utilities such as the Modesto Irrigation District could be prevented from providing electricity to new customers right next door to customers we already serve,” the district’s assistant general manager, Tom Kimball, said in a news release. “Not only will Proposition 16 have a negative impact on public utility operations, it will potentially escalate electric rates for all consumers as well.”
The lawsuit’s backers say the ballot measure deceptively hides PG&E’s role in it as well as its purpose.
The utility is the only contributor on record to the “Yes on 16” campaign, according to state campaign finance records. It has contributed at least $25 million to the campaign, giving it an ample war chest for advertising. Opponents have raised less than $23,000, according to campaign finance records.
The “Yes on 16” campaign portrays itself as simply interested in increasing voters’ rights over public utilities’ spending.
“We think the voters should have a say in that. Apparently, these folks don’t,” Yes on 16 spokeswoman Robin Swanson told the San Francisco Chronicle.
San Francisco city attorney Dennis Herrera says PG&E concealed the true nature and purpose of the initiative which, he argues, is to protect the utility from competition from public providers of electric service.
“State law enables courts to remove initiatives that misrepresent and conceal their true nature and purpose,” Herrera said in a news release. “If our elections laws are to have meaning, the court should strike this deceptive amendment from the ballot.”
In addition to imposing limits on traditional municipal utilities, the ballot measure would also apply limits to community choice aggregation, a setup that allows public entities to buy power and acquire their own generation assets, while delivering electricity to consumers through the existing grids of investor-owned utilities.
So far only one such effort, in Marin County, has been launched.
