A RADICAL HIGH COURT RULING ON LEGISLATURES COULD BACKFIRE

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2022, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
   "A RADICAL HIGH COURT RULING ON LEGISLATURES COULD BACKFIRE”

 

        Ever since ex-President Donald Trump placed three conservative justices there, the U.S. Supreme Court has seemed to many like an extension of the extreme right wing of the national Republican Party.

 

        Now, after an early December court hearing on a lawsuit aiming to give state legislatures – and only the legislatures – power over almost every aspect of how federal elections are conducted, there suddenly arises the possibility of a major backfire from any such decision by America’s highest court.

 

        The reason for this potential backfire resides most prominently here in California. This state is so large and leans so strongly Democratic that if legislators here reverse some longstanding state election policies, they could cause big changes nationally.

 

        Especially if some potential California actions were imitated in other large-population blue states like Illinois and New York and Oregon and Washington.

 

        Here’s are the stakes in the Supreme Court case brought by North Carolina Republican legislators: State legislatures could be authorized to draw future legislative and congressional district boundaries any way they like, with no say for either governors or state courts. The North Carolina GOP sued because that state’s Supreme Court wouldn’t let them get away with patently partisan district maps guaranteed to perpetuate big Republican majorities in its legislature and congressional delegation.

 

        If the Supreme Court, as some justices have indicated it might, awards such ultimately extreme powers to state legislatures, it could also be permitting state lawmakers to substitute presidential Electoral College members of their preference for those elected by voters. This would be a prescription for election irrelevance, and would make voter suppression laws of the recent past look like mild, amateur tactics.

 

        Essentially, it would let state Legislatures and not the voters of any or all states make the most important civic decisions virtually unchecked.

 

        Except…California legislators would have it in their power to reverse much of what multiple other states might do. They could create a whole new kind of check and balance for the court and those other legislatures to consider.

 

        In a way, California voters created today’s small Republican majority in the House of Representatives when they used ballot propositions to set up independent redistricting commissions for legislative and congressional districts here.

 

        The new GOP majority exists only because California elected 40 Democrats and 12 Republicans to the House in November, using district lines drawn by the independent commission, which had equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats.

 

        But if the Supreme Court says legislatures – and not voters – have ultimate power over redistricting, state lawmakers here could overturn the independent commission’s district lines anytime they like. With Democrats holding two-thirds-plus majorities in both houses of this state’s Legislature, they could draw any lines they wished, should the Supreme Court find for  the North Carolina Republicans.

 

        Does anyone seriously think a Democratic-drawn plan here would have enabled narrow victories for Republican representatives like John Duarte, Michelle Steel, Mike Garcia, David Valadao, Kevin Kiley or Young Kim, without whom there is no GOP majority? Does anyone seriously think a Democratic-drawn plan would have set up Orange County Democrat Katie Porter for several nail-biting post-election weeks?

 

        There’s not a chance of that. Nor would there be any chance for Republicans, as they just did, to take away a formerly Democratic seat in Oregon and maintain all its seats in Washington state. The same in Illinois and New York, scene of a major Republican upset.

 

        So there is plenty of room for backfire if the Supreme Court goes extreme in granting state legislators almost unchecked power.

 

        And what if the high court gave Republican-led legislatures in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania authority to substitute presidential electors different from those chosen by voters, and those legislatures then actually did that and reversed a national election outcome?

 

        Does the Supreme Court seriously believe only extremist far-right activists are capable of reacting with an insurrection? If so, they’ve forgotten the almost anonymous leftists of Antifa, who in 2020 and 2021 rioted and took over parts of cities like Portland and Seattle.

 

        So here’s a cautionary word to the conservative Supreme Court majority: If you open Pandora’s Box and sow the wind by changing America’s traditional political and electoral checks and balances, you could live to reap whatever whirlwind might follow.

 

-30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

NEWSOM CAN CONTROL THE 2024 SENATE RACE

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2022, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“NEWSOM CAN CONTROL THE 2024 SENATE RACE”

 

Unless something serious happens soon to five-term Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the politics of 2023 in California shapes up as a time of careful positioning by a horde of fellow Democrats angling for the 89-year-old Feinstein’s job.

 

If he likes, Gov. Gavin Newsom can control this scene. He has reportedly told President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris he will not run against either in 2024.

 

That makes Newsom seem prepared for at least five years of waiting, something he did very well while serving as lieutenant governor for the eight years of Jerry Brown’s final two terms as governor.

 

Being the state’s nominal No. 2 gave Newsom some visibility while he awaited Brown’s departure, after which he easily whipped all rivals in both major parties when he finally got to run for Brown’s office.

 

        But what happens next for Newsom if he doesn’t run for president in 2024, as he’s apparently promised the two most likely Democratic candidates for this country’s top political job?

 

        Whether Biden or Harris or a Republican like ex-

President Donald Trump or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis

wins the presidency next time out, Newsom could face

serious down time, especially while termed out as

governor from 2026 through early 2028, thus losing

the political limelight – unless he goes after Feinstein’s

Senate seat.

 

        With all his likely 2028 Democratic presidential rivals already

holding offices of their own, Newsom would need a

constant spotlight to remain a leading candidate while

out of office.

 

     This is something Mike Pence, Trump’s vice president

for four years, faces right now, along with former Secretary

of State Mike Pompeo and other Republicans who plainly

want to be president, but for now are settling for writing

books and hoping Trump and DeSantis somehow self

destruct before 2024.

 

For sure, Trump has the potential to wreck himself. He

lately has possessed something like political Velcro, rather than Teflon, as just about everything sticks to him.

 

But Biden appears unlikely to self-immolate. His

gaffes are invariably forgiven by media and voters, possibly because of a lifelong history of malaprops.

 

        So Newsom will have to decide, if he really sits out

2024, what he’ll do to set himself up as the Democratic

frontrunner for 2028, his seeming target year.

 

Yes, he could write a book, but it probably could only

be about his California experiences, since unlike Pence and Pompeo, he’s never held high federal office.

 

This could make a Senate run the answer for Newsom. If he chooses that, he can expect plenty of competition in his own party. Start with Burbank Congressman Adam Schiff, who became prominent while ramrodding both impeachments of Trump. Republican leaders in Congress now are helping keep a spotlight on Schiff even as he moves into the minority, intending to take away his seat on the House Intelligence Committee.

 

        Schiff has major senatorial support among California Democrats, but has never run statewide. So there’s room for other contenders like Xavier Becerra, the current secretary of Health and Human Services who twice won election as California’s attorney general after a long career in Congress.

 

        Orange County Congresswoman Katie Porter, who barely won reelection last fall in a redrawn district, might figure she has a better shot at the Senate than winning reelection repeatedly in her now-largely-Republican part of the OC.

 

        There’s also Shirley Weber, to whom Newsom tossed the bone of the secretary of state’s office in 2021, when he named Alex Padilla to the Senate seat Harris once held. Weber and some other black women were offended when the Harris seat did not go to another black woman, and she might seek to remedy that with her own run for Feinstein’s spot. There are also San Francisco Bay area Reps. Barbara Lee and Ro Khanna, both with longtime delusions of grandeur.

 

And there are mayors like Eric Garcetti, for 10 years the top official in Los Angeles, and London Breed of San Francisco.

 

        It’s doubtful any of the others can best Newsom in a primary election, no matter what they now think. Which means in next year’s tussle, the governor can call most of the shots – if he chooses.

-30-
    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

CALIFORNIA FARES WELL IN ‘GREAT RESIGNATION’

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 23, 2022, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “CALIFORNIA FARES WELL IN ‘GREAT RESIGNATION’”

 

        Millions of Americans have quit their jobs each month over the last year and a half – essentially ever since vaccines reduced the frequency and intensity of bouts with most variants of COVID-19.

 

        At the same time, some California cities emptied at generationally high rates, with San Francisco the best example, losing more than 6 percent of its populace to the new white collar reality of working at home, with location almost completely irrelevant.

 

        Workers can be in Montenegro as easily as Montebello, and hardly anyone will know the difference.

 

        This creates unprecedented worker mobility all over the country, as huge numbers take months or years off and survive on savings or fortunes accumulated via stock options over the last 15 years.

 

        It also causes many of the “help wanted” signs appearing in the windows of myriad workplaces, from post offices to Starbucks, small bakeries, customer service telephone centers and restaurants. It means shorter menus, too, as cooks and chefs are hard to find. It’s also a time of finding your own merchandise at big box stores, helpful salespeople now scarcer than ever. Radio ads even offered $3,000 signing bonuses to new bus drivers in Los Angeles, treatment normally reserved for individuals with specialized abilities and training.

 

        Since California leads the nation in almost every social and economic trend, good or bad, the expectation might be that more folks are resigning their jobs here than anywhere else. That presumption would be dead wrong.

 

        New findings from the WalletHub website, which tracks a variety of economic trends, show California ranks as the No. 38 state in resignations. Just 2.53 percent of workers here have quit their jobs over the last year, the website found.

 

        Florida, whose governor continually compares his state to California, ranked fourth in resignations, as almost twice as high a proportion of its populace quit. Texas was 28^th, while Alaska led the great resignation, with a 4.7 percent annualized rate of departures. Maybe it’s the cold, dark winters and physical isolation that comes with living in most parts of that physically huge state.

 

        Why is California faring better than the vast majority of other states in this societal upheaval?

 

        It may be the long experience of the tech industry with gig workers, who for many years have moved around frequently while hunting for ever greener pastures.

 

Where in most states there is a large pay gap between job shifters and long-term workers, that is much less common in California. Nationally, says the Cantabria economic blog, the average pay differential is 7 percent, with – for example – the median salary for established software development managers at $131,000, while new hires in the same job get a median pay of $143,000 regardless of age or experience.

 

        To avoid that differential, which can spur resentful longtime employees to search for new jobs, companies must constantly grant raises and bonuses to existing workers so newcomers don’t outpace their pay. If those firms then hit unexpected hard times, it can lead to layoffs, which lately have hit companies like Meta and Salesforce.

 

        The almost constant upward momentum all this created over the last 20 months is one reason U.S. wages overall rose 4.7 percent in that time.

 

        Many California companies are long accustomed to these phenomena, which created massive new wealth for youthful high tech workers at companies like Google and Apple and Hulu. Most Silicon Valley companies see to it that longer-term employees are at least as well off as new hires. Failure to do that would lead to shuffles and a much higher California resignation rate.

 

        Women, too, are using the great resignation to eliminate much of the longtime pay gap between themselves and men. CNBC reports 85 percent of women workers believe they deserve pay increases and 65 percent think the resignation wave gives them more leverage to get them.

 

        Of the 47 million Americans who quit jobs in 2021, most of those responding to surveys cited better pay and benefits as reasons. It’s still unknown if women actually reduced the pre-existing 18 percent pay gap between them and white males in similar jobs.

 

        All this may be inconvenient for businesses, but it’s also providing bonanzas for many thousands of workers.

 

-30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

DIABLO CANYON ERRORS WILL SOON COST MOST CALIFORNIANS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2022, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

     “DIABLO CANYON ERRORS WILL SOON COST MOST CALIFORNIANS”

 

        The benefits to Pacific Gas & Electric Co. from keeping the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant near San Luis Obispo open longer than previously scheduled are now very clear: electricity customers all over California soon will almost certainly be paying the big utility for not producing power.

 

        That’s the apparent bottom line, after Diablo Canyon shut down for substantial periods twice in the last six months because PG&E violated its own management procedures.

 

        The outages at the huge generating station, which when working can produce 8.5 percent of all power created in California, came when a hydrogen cooling system within the plant’s Unit 2 leaked and had to be shut down manually.

 

        Resulting energy losses from Diablo Canyon demonstrated the plant’s unreliability, which was also on view in 2020-21, when the facility experienced 149 days of unplanned outages over a 476-day period. Essentially, Diablo produced little or nothing over one third of that time.

 

        PG&E customers are likely to be dunned $178.6 million for the costs of replacement power during the shutdowns of the last 30 months. But the state law that will let Diablo keep operating through 2030, more than five years beyond its previously planned closure date, will have all customers of privately-owned utilities everywhere in California foot the bills for future Diablo problems, up to $300 million.

 

        The extension was Gov. Gavin Newsom’s way of providing backup electricity during heat waves when blackouts have been threatened repeatedly in recent years. But Newsom’s backup turns out to be a plant that has recently been dead weight about one-third of the time.

 

        The entire plan, passed with little public review by the Legislature in the dying days of its 2022 session, can be seen as Newsom again rewarding PG&E for the $10 million-plus it has contributed to his many campaigns.

 

        Or, it can be seen as plain stupidity. For sure, the new subsidies for Diablo’s error-caused outages are a recognition that it’s risky to count on the 40-year-old facility as an ultimate power backup.

 

        Said Rochelle Becker, executive director of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, a longtime Diablo Canyon watchdog, “The extraordinary size of these (outage) costs is a very bad omen for Diablo’s post-2024 future.”

 

        Becker points out that most of the recent Diablo outages have been caused by operator errors, including “the botched installation of the newest equipment at the plant, the Unit 2 main generator stator. (That’s the part that went haywire in the latest shutdowns.) History shows that with PG&E, if something can go wrong, it will.”

 

        That’s strong language, but it is backed up by PG&E’s record of the last 12 years, including a natural gas explosion that killed eight in San Bruno and company-caused fires that killed about 100 persons and destroyed towns like Paradise and Greenville, leading to multiple manslaughter convictions for the company.

 

        It’s not an enviable record, and for California to depend on extended use of one of the company’s older facilities might turn out to be a huge and expensive mistake.

 

        It’s all part of the coddling of utilities by a long series of California governors, Democrat and Republican, all of whom received large donations from utility companies, then appointed regulators who consistently favor the companies over their customers.

 

        That’s why Southern California Edison consumers, soon to begin subsidizing PG&E mistakes, are still paying on their unjustly assigned $3.3 billion share of the $4.7 billion cost of  closing the failed San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, which became a white elephant after to an Edison blunder.

 

        It’s why PG&E’s corporate survival was allowed under a plan seeing customers pay multiple billions into a fund designed to pay for damages from future wildfires caused by that company.

 

        The question now is whether extending Diablo’s life will turn out to be yet another regulatory and consumer blunder.

 

        In the very likely event that it does, PG&E will get even more hundreds of millions of dollars than it already has from California electric bills. And none of this even begins to count the $1 billion in federal tax dollars the Biden administration granted the company late last month.

 

   -30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

LEGISLATURE MUST FIX VIOLENT CRIME DEFINITIONS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2022 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

     “LEGISLATURE MUST FIX VIOLENT CRIME DEFINITIONS”

 

        Words matter, we often hear in this contentious political era when politicians frequently say things and then deny they meant what their words said.

 

        Words also matter in the California penal code, where the label “violent” is not thrown around as much as it obviously should be. That tag currently is not applied to many crimes most people with common sense know are violent. Some examples include assault with a deadly weapon, soliciting murder, elder and child abuse, arson, human trafficking, plus some forms of rape and forced sodomy.

 

        All are obviously violent, until it comes to sentencing someone who has committed one of more of these crimes.

 

        This has mattered a lot since the 2016 passage of Proposition 57, a pet project of then-Gov. Jerry Brown, who desperately wanted to clear thousands of convicts out of the state’s prison system.

 

        His initiative, passed by a 64-36 percent margin (almost 2-1), allows inmates whose crimes are not legally defined as violent to win early parole in exchange for good  behavior and other achievements like earning college degrees.

 

        No one knew in 2016 what the exact consequences would be. But police chiefs warned at the time that one result would be more violent crime. So part of the Proposition 57 campaign was a commitment by state legislators to expand the list of crimes considered violent. But like many other things promised by politicians, that never happened.

 

        One result was a gang shootout that killed six and left 12 persons injured last April in Sacramento. It eventually emerged that one of the murder suspects in that case bearing the rather ironic nickname “Smiley” Martin, had spent a mere four years in prison, despite a 10-year sentence for domestic violence and assault to commit great bodily injury – both considered “nonviolent” crimes under this state’s penal code – but not by many others.

 

        Even though Prop. 57 had been the project of liberals in the Legislature, the April episode caught enough attention from leftist Attorney General Rob Bonta to get him interested in having the Legislature at last follow up on its 2016 pledge to expand the list of formally defined violent crimes.

 

        Bonta, a former Democratic Assemblyman from Alameda who supported Prop. 57, told a reporter last fall that “Domestic violence, human trafficking, rape of an unconscious person – all of those should be discussed and potentially changed under whatever the appropriate means is for Prop. 57. I think if people are asked, ‘Is this a violent crime? Or is it not a violent crime?’ I think people will say, ‘It’s a violent crime,’ so I think those should be considered for change.”

 

        So should some others, like assault with a deadly weapon, soliciting murder, and forced sodomy, among others.

 

        It is, in short, high time to make California law and rules of imprisonment line up with common sense.

 

        For there’s a lot more to the crime problems Prop. 57 has caused than merely the Sacramento gunfight.

 

        One report presented to Orange County supervisors about one year after the initiative passed claimed that one-fourth of the first 8,000 felons released back into that county under prison realignment furthered by 57 was convicted of another crime in the year after their discharge.

 

        That rate just about matched prior recidivism, which some took to mean that both 57 and the reclassification of many crimes from felonies to misdemeanors under the previous Proposition 47 did not increase crime.

 

        And yet…some crimes have risen sharply. In San Francisco, car burglaries and other property crimes rose by 667 cases per 100,000 population in just the first year of 57. There were similar increases in Long Beach and Los Angeles.

 

        Although the COVID-19 pandemic saw a respite in rising crime rates, they’ve recently been going up more.

 

        These realities are the reason the state’s Association of Deputy District Attorneys has called 57 a “full-fledged assault on public safety.”

 

        The way to begin fixing that is for legislators now coming into a new session to start reclassifying obviously violent crimes as what they really are, and stop allowing early releases for many of the most dangerous convicts.

 

    -30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

 

GAS GOUGING QUESTION: HOW MUCH TO DUN THE REFINERS?

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2022, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “GAS GOUGING QUESTION: HOW MUCH TO DUN THE REFINERS?”

 

        For many months, there has been little or no doubt that California's five big gasoline refiners were gouging most of this state’s drivers. The question now is how much of a windfall profit tax to assess and whether to send that money directly back to people who fill their tanks regularly.

 

        Electric car drivers, for one example, probably don’t deserve any of the projected return of cash contemplated in a special session of the Legislature called by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

 

        Newsom’s move marks the first time any California governor has actually tried to stop the refiners from cheating Californians at the pump.

 

        Sure, there are still folks who take the side of the oil companies, claiming things like California’s high gas taxes, old and decrepit refineries that need frequent repairs and special seasonal smog-busting gas formulations are the reason for the sudden price increases that still afflict the state 10 months after February’s sudden $2-plus price increases.

 

        Here’s the problem with that thinking: All those factors existed long before February and were already factored for years into the prices that prevailed before, so they could not have played a role in this year’s huge price increase, no matter what refiners might say.

 

        This realization is the why the Legislature last fall overwhelmingly passed a new law that will force refiners to report their per-gallon gasoline profits starting at the end of January.

 

        For now, though, it is not all that difficult to calculate the likely profit margins for the big refiners that make 97 percent of California gas: Marathon, Valero, Phillips 66, Chevron and PBF.

 

        “The proof of the gouging always comes out in the companies’ profit reports,” said Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, which has emerged as this state’s most active consumer advocacy organization.

 

        The group’s analyses have rarely proven wrong over the more than 30 years since it made big headlines for writing and then running the campaign for the 1988 Proposition 103, which lowered California insurance rates, made the insurance commissioner an elected official and has so far saved consumers several billion dollars.

 

        Over the last 20 years, says the group’s analysis of the most recent profit statements from the big refiners and their parent oil companies, California refiners averaged about 30 cents per gallon in profits and rarely cleared more than 50 cents per gallon, or about $21 per barrel. “Now,” says Court, “they are raking in more than $1 per gallon in profit. These windfall profits must be rebated to California drivers to stop oil refiners’ price gouging.

 

        “The reason California have paid $2.50 per gallon more for their gasoline is clearly price gouging.”

 

        Valero’s third quarter report revealed a lot about this. The Texas company’s net income was $2.8 billion for the third quarter of this year, ending Sept. 30. This more than quintupled the $463 million reported for the same quarter last year. Valero’s California profits were also higher than in any of its other regions around the nation and the world.

 

        “The oil companies must again treat Californians like customers rather than ATMs,” said Court.

 

        Now it’s up to state legislators to decide how much of the refiners’ new income is ordinary profit and how much is in the windfall category, the result of corporate collusion or taking advantage of artificially created shortages.

 

        Consumer Watchdog analysts suggest that if a 50 cent per gallon windfall profit tax were applied to the four in-state refiners that report results quarterly (Chevron does it annually), those four would owe motorists more than $930 million for excess profits in the first half of this year.

 

        Add in Chevron, which makes 29 percent of California gas, and the return to buyers would be well over $1 billion. Returning that would be one way to fight the inflation that has been fueled to a large degree by refiners.

 

        But until they passed the law demanding monthly per-gallon profit reports, legislators had always handled the oil companies with kid gloves. Now those gloves are off. We will know soon if the legislators really were serious, or whether they will quickly revert to being oil company lapdogs.

 

-30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

NO ONE VERY PLEASED AS NEW ROOFTOP SOLAR RULES IMPROVE

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2022, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “NO ONE VERY PLEASED AS NEW ROOFTOP SOLAR RULES IMPROVE”

 

        Only rarely does the California Public Utilities Commission, long known as the least responsive agency in state government to consumer concerns, return to the drawing board once it proposes a problem “solution.”

 

        That’s partly because when the utilities commission (the PUC) floats ideas, it is essentially proposing them to itself; the five commissioners charged with coming up with ideas are also the ones with the votes to impose them on every affected Californian.

 

        So the new rooftop solar rules the commission proposed in November are very unusual: An almost completely reworked proposal that hopes to keep rooftop energy expanding, but also to bring more equity for electricity consumers unable to pay for rooftop solar or living in apartments, condominiums and other places not suited for it.

 

        The originally proposed new rules, offered in late 2021, sought to cut payments by 80 percent to solar rooftop owners for excess power their panels generate which is sent to the overall state power grid, and thus increases renewable energy supplies for everyone.  They also aimed to charge rooftop solar owners a fee of about $60 per month for linking to the grid, which lets them draw power when solar linked storage batteries run dry.

 

        Since most solar rooftop owners pay upwards of $20,000 for panels and installation in order to avoid monthly electric bills, this plan promised to cut installations vastly. That would put about 67,000 installer and manufacturing jobs at risk, while slowing California’s march toward 100 percent renewable electricity.

 

        Consumer groups and solar rooftop owners howled. Soon, Gov. Gavin Newsom, who appoints PUC members to staggered six-year terms but cannot fire them once they’re confirmed by the state Senate, joined the chorus.

 

        So, in a virtually unprecedented move, the commissioners pulled back their plan from the brink of adoption, promising to create a revised proposal.

 

        The new plan would still cut what solar owners are paid for excess energy, but not as much. This is their sop to advocates for utility customers unable to afford or install rooftop solar. The new rules would apply mostly to new rooftop solar owners.

 

Some advocates for non-rooftop electric customers have complained they pay monthly to maintain the state’s grid, while solar owners who link to that grid for emergency use don’t help with that cost.

 

        At the same time, the new plan eliminates the proposed $60 monthly fee.

 

        So this is a compromise. It does not make anyone very happy, but was fair enough to avoid the kind of withering criticism that drew Newsom to oppose the previous proposal.

 

        The new plan’s exact reduction in what each solar owner can get for excess power will be based on the state’s “avoided cost” calculator, which figures how much solar owners save on electric bills each month.

 

        Rooftop solar advocates like the Oakland-based Center for Biological Diversity, concede the new plan is an improvement, but oppose the reductions in electricity prices paid to owners.

 

        The avoided cost calculator, it says, “ignores many benefits of (solar returned to the grid)…such as (improved) grid reliability, reduction in greenhouse gas and air pollution and local economic benefits including job creation.”

 

        That likely will not convince the commissioners, who appear bent on imposing their new plan in a scheduled Dec. 16 meeting.

 

        And yet, the new plan is the first sign in many years that the PUC may occasionally listen to consumers, rather than only utility companies. The commission has been widely criticized for more than 50 years for favoring companies like Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric over their customers.

 

        This time, with all three of those companies firmly behind the original version of the new rooftop solar rules because it would have eliminated their payments to small solar owners, the PUC has bent a bit to a specific group of consumers, the residential solar owners.

 

        That still leaves the PUC far short of looking after the interests of most utility customers, as the new responsiveness mainly benefits a group with above-average wealth.

 

        Which makes the new solar metering plan an improvement, but does not lessen big doubts about the commission’s responsiveness.    

 
-30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

LA VOTERS SEND SCOFFLAW SHERIFFS A STATEWIDE WARNING

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2022, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

"LA VOTERS SEND SCOFFLAW SHERIFFS A STATEWIDE WARNING“

 

Los Angeles County voters have just sent a powerful and threatening message to scofflaw sheriffs all around California: enforce the laws, even ones you don’t like, or you may not hold your office much longer.

 

They did this in two emphatic ways: First, they defeated the state’s leading scofflaw sheriff, Alex Villanueva, by more than 18 percentage points, over 320,000 votes. Then, a short distance down their ballots, they voted by an overwhelming 69 percent majority to allow firing of future sheriffs if 80 percent of their county’s supervisors vote for an ouster.

 

That local proposition, known as Measure A, specified that sheriffs can only be canned if they break laws, flagrantly neglect their duties, misappropriate funds, falsity documents or obstruct an investigation. Villanueva has been informally charged with almost all of these.

  

        Villanueva may have been the most obviously egregious of California’s scofflaw lawmen and women, with his well publicized refusals to enforce COVID-19 quarantines and masking, trying to obstruct the work of the county’s oversight commission, condoning deputy gangs and more, but he was far from the only sheriff exposed during the height of the pandemic.

 

        Refusal by sheriffs and police chiefs to enforce state law was most common during the height of Covid infections, which so far have killed more than 93,000 Californians. At the end of 2020, before Covid vaccines began cutting down cases and hospitalizations, at least two dozen law enforcement agencies were refusing to observe or enforce emergency stay-at-home, crowd size and masking orders from state and local public health officers.

 

        Of the five counties with the highest seven-day average Covid caseload in the week leading up to Christmas 2020, only one had taken strong enforcement measures to protect its people.

 

        Wherever those measures were enforced, they proved effective. Statistics show that if this state had pursued the laissez faire, everything-stays-open approach used in Florida and some other states, more than 40,000 more Californians would be dead today.

 

        But the scofflaw sheriffs didn’t care. Villanueva was not moved to act, nor were sheriffs in nearby Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties, among others ranging as far north as Del Norte County on the Oregon border.

 

 

        But nothing happened to Villanueva or the other refusing sheriffs until it was time for Villanueva to seek reelection this fall. That’s when his political house came crashing down.

 

        There is little doubt former Long Beach Police Chief Robert Luna, Villanueva’s successor, will be far more circumspect, making sure to enforce even laws that are unpopular or inconvenient, like the anti-Covid tactics. But it’s uncertain what might happen elsewhere. For example, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco was reelected outright in the June 7 primary, and so has another four years in office.

 

        But Measure A provides an example showing elected supervisors in other counties, who have never had much authority over sheriffs, that they, too, can bring recalcitrant law enforcement kingpins to heel. That applies to reluctant law enforcers in counties from Sacramento to Imperial near the Mexican border.

 

        Villanueva opposed Measure A as “an illegal motion that would allow corrupt supervisors to intimidate sheriffs from carrying out their official duties to investigate crime.” Of course, just after the November vote, he faced an investigation of his own, the local district attorney now looking into allegations that he tried to dun his deputies for campaign donations once he realized his reelection was in doubt.

 

        In any case, the vast majority of Los Angeles County voters did not heed Villanueva’s protestations, and he will soon be gone. Whether he is prosecuted for corruption over allegedly seeking campaign money from deputies, with the implicit threat of punishment if they did not donate, remains uncertain.

 

        But county supervisors who voted 4-1 to place Measure A on the ballot said they believed he was guilty of at least three of the shortcomings listed in the proposition as grounds for dismissal.

 

        If  Villanueva’s loss and the easy passage of Measure A doesn’t tell other sheriffs they must enforce even laws they don’t like, it’s hard to see what might.

       

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net