Supporters of the effort to put SDG&E out of business, and have a local government oversee the transmission and distribution of electricity, have apparently recognized that their biggest obstacle may be a perceived lack of trust in how well the city is operating.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
At the Politifest 2025 discussion on how we can make electricity more affordable, former City Manager Jack McGrory argued that the best hope was to push SDG&E to keep trying to lower bills and advocate for the legislature to remove some of the many mandates they\u2019ve put into electric bills. \u00a0<\/p>\n
But his main point was residents simply couldn\u2019t trust the city of San Diego to run their power company.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you actually trust the City Council of this city to take over the electric grid? Remember you are using your computers, your lights, all of your technology. Do you trust these guys \u2026 They\u2019re $8 billion in the hole on infrastructure maintenance. You can\u2019t drive on a goddamn city street without ruining your tires. You want them now to take over your electricity?\u201d McGrory said.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
No, at least not even Bill Powers, who made the case for creating a community-owned, \u201cno-profit\u201d utility. A government agency would have to buy the power lines and more from SDG&E. If SDG&E refused to sell them, the movement hopes the government would use eminent domain to take them.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI agree with Jack that a municipal utility, a public electric utility, should not be a city department. I\u2019m sold on that. But there are numerous structures that can be used to firewall it from city council, from the mayor,\u201d Powers said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
He said there were many structures you can use, including creating a special district or running it as a quasi independent agency like the San Diego Housing Commission. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe community just doesn\u2019t have trust in the city\u2019s ability to manage something complicated,\u201d Powers said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
McGrory tried to predict exactly how it would go.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cUltimately the city of San Diego is a corporation is going to have to decide how the utility is going to be governed. And trust me, when the unions get involved in this, and the unions with this particular city council, it\u2019ll be a city utility. It\u2019ll be a city department run by the city of San Diego,\u201d McGrory said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Powers\u2019 presentation won the Solutions Showdown. His core point was SDG&E\u2019s profits could immediately be redirected to lower prices and community benefits.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have over 40 public electric utilities in the state. Their hallmark: lower rates, high reliability, good customer service, fast interconnection. More importantly, they are under local control. We do not have that with SDG&E,\u201d Powers said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Powers and the group Public Power San Diego hope to qualify a ballot measure (and then win the vote for it) that would force the city to act on municipalizing the electricity grid.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Supporters of the effort to put SDG&E out of business, and have a local government oversee the transmission…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":284522,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,1582,276,146172,3549,7264,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-284521","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-politifest-2025","12":"tag-san-diego","13":"tag-sandiego","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-united-states-of-america","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","18":"tag-us","19":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115334267871943768","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284521\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/284522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}