WILL CONSUMERS PAY UTILITY’S BIG FIRE FINE?

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JUNE 24, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“WILL CONSUMERS PAY UTILITY’S BIG FIRE FINE?”

 

When California’s second-largest electric utility settled a U.S. Forest Service claim for starting a huge fire that covered 114,577 acres in 2020, officials of that power company could not or would not say whether they will try to get their customers to pay the freight.

 

At stake here is $82.5 million which Southern California Edison Co. agreed to pay the Forest Service, which is supposed to use the money to restore or replace more than 100 buildings, many trails and at least 178 vehicles, among other items destroyed in the Bobcat Fire that started Sept. 6, 2020 in the Angeles National Forest northeast of Los Angeles.

 

But the answer to the question of whether consumers will be dunned is already known, even if Edison officials had no immediate response: Of course, the customers will pay. The problem is that the payment, probably averaging more than $5 for each of Edison’s 15 million customers, will never officially be called a reimbursement for the settlement, even though that’s what it will be.

 

This is common practice with the California Public Utilities Commission, which has a long record of restoring fines it charges big utilities like Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric for their many misdeeds via their next routine rate increase request.

 

Edison, like its fellow privately owned utilities, almost always has a rate increase case going before the CPUC. One is happening right now.

 

This rate case sees Edison asking a 23 percent increase in its rates over the years 2026 to 2028, with a decision in that case possible as early as this summer. If it got the full requested increase, customers’ monthly bills would rise by about $17.49 in the first year, adding to California’s status as having the second-highest electricity bills in the USA, trailing only isolated Hawaii.

 

Edison says it needs the extra money for wildfire mitigation, which was found deficient when its equipment helped start the Bobcat fire. Edison equipment also is suspected to have caused the far more destructive Eaton fire that destroyed much of Altadena last January, with executives not even denying those accusations.

 

The new Donald Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Los Angeles area, former Republican state Assemblyman Bill Essayli of Corona, said the “record settlement against…Edison provides meaningful compensation to taxpayers for the extensive costs of fighting the Bobcat fire and for the widespread damage to public lands.”

 

It may, but the effect on Edison, which continued handing out executive bonuses over the last several years while its equipment helped cause many fires, will be nil.

 

While Edison won’t get the full amount its rate case requests, history suggests it will get most. The more than $80 million in this settlement will be dwarfed by the rate increase and consumers will be lucky if Edison’s bosses so much as blink when they pay up on the settlement.

 

It's all part of the PUC’s decades-long “kabuki dance” with the companies it regulates, where the firms ask for significantly higher rate increases than they know they will get, realizing all along they will get more than they really need and knowing that all fines will essentially be repaid by consumers via the new and higher prices. (In Japanese kabuki dances, elaborate plots often play out, with everyone knowing all along how they will turn out, exactly what happens in rate cases before the CPUC.)

 

So, no, don’t feel the slightest bit sorry for Edison or PG&E the next time you hear they are being fined many millions of dollars for their equipment failures and poor vegetation clearance, even as customers pay them huge sums to maintain and improve that very equipment and vegetation control.

 

Instead, understand this is what happened when utility customers were assessed $13 billion to create the state Wildfire Fund, used to pay for damages caused by utility equipment in fires since the fund was created in 2019 after PG&E suffered a fire-related bankruptcy.

 

Customers will keep paying so long as California governors appoint PUC members willing to let the big utilities off the hook for their misdeeds or negligence. Sadly, there is no end in sight for this.

 

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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

PICK YOUR OPPONENT’ PLOY FAILS BONTA

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
   1720 OAK STREET, SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA 90405
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JUNE 24, 2022, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

     “’PICK YOUR OPPONENT’ PLOY FAILS BONTA”

 

        It was a ploy, much like one first used in the modern era of California politics by the late Democratic U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston in his 1986 reelection bid. The tactic worked that time.

 

        But radio ads that hit California airwaves in large quantities in May, as the primary election approached, did not work this spring.

 

        The ads touted the state attorney general candidacy of previously little known Republican candidate Eric Early, the most conservative hopeful in the running and an unapologetic supporter of ex-President Donald Trump.

 

        They were funded primarily by a pro-labor political action committee whose desire was to create as easy a path to election as possible for the appointed Democratic incumbent Rob Bonta, by far the most liberal candidate in the field.

 

 

        Bonta backers did not want his November opponent to be the most credible Republican in the field, former prosecutor Nathan Hochman, a party-backed hopeful who pledges to be tougher on criminals than Bonta – a longtime supporter of the “no-cash-bail” system overwhelmingly nixed by voters in 2020.

 

Bonta has also threatened numerous cities with costly lawsuits if they don’t knuckle under by OKing large amounts of new housing construction as called for by the state Department of Housing and Community Development, whose figures have been labeled unreliable by the state’s nonpartisan auditor.

 

        The radio ad sponsors plain hope was that California’s top two “jungle primary” would give Bonta an opponent far less electable than Hochman might turn out to be. But Hochman holds a significant edge over Early with most votes counted. The final count might not be known for weeks, but Hochman is Bonta’s apparent November opponent.

 

        As an incumbent in a state where no Democratic statewide officeholder has lost a reelection bid since the 1980s, there was never much doubt Bonta would win the primary vote. But one nuance of top two is that even with a clear Bonta majority in the primary, he still would need to run again in November against the No. 2 finisher.

 

        Knowing this, Bonta’s supporters wanted to split the Republican vote between Early and Hochman and allow no-party-preference candidate Anne Marie Schubert, the Sacramento County district attorney, to sneak into the fall runoff. That didn’t happen, as Hochman took second place and  Early in third, both far ahead of Schubert.

 

           Bonta backers figured Hochman could be tougher for Bonta to beat because he had major-party backing, while Schubert was strictly on her own and Early would be hurt by strong anti-Trump feeling in California.

 

        The system is significantly different today than in the pre-top two days when Cranston, feeling threatened by the moderate Republican Silicon Valley Congressman Ed Zschau, encouraged backers to donate more than $100,000 to American Independent Party candidate Edward Vallen, who used it mostly for radio ads strikingly similar to this spring’s ads touting Early. They essentially said Zschau was dishonest, claiming Vallen and Cranston were the only candidates in the race with integrity.

 

Cranston eventually won reelection by just 104,000 votes, while Vallen pulled 109,000, including many that figured to go to Zschau if the ultra-conservative Vallen had not been a factor, albeit a minor one.

 

        The ploy infuriated Republicans at the time, but it worked for Cranston, very likely responsible for the last of the four terms he served before Democrat Barbara Boxer won his old seat in 1992.

 

        The odds are that even though this ploy did not work  for Bonta, he will nevertheless win election in his own right this fall. That’s because Democrats outnumber Republicans almost 2-1 on the rolls of registered California voters, and no statewide GOP candidate except the movie muscleman Arnold Schwarzenegger has been able to overcome that deficit since it began to appear in the 1990s.

 

        No one else had used the “boost your opponent” playbook to a significant extent in a statewide race in the 36 years that passed since Cranston did it. But modern PACs and their sometimes hidden donors are well situated to repeat it, even if that displeases or offends some voters.

       

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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

 

Suggested pullout quote: “The ploy worked for Cranston, but not for Bonta.”

CALIFORNIA PRIMARY STILL NEEDS A MOVE-UP

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JUNE 24, 2016 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“CALIFORNIA PRIMARY STILL NEEDS A MOVE-UP”

          Whew! The most actively contested California presidential primary election in decades is over. Candidates Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Bernard Sanders were ubiquitous for a month, logging thousands of miles and dozens of rallies. New voters registered by the hundreds of thousands.

But it meant very little in the end because of abysmal timing. Millions of Californians ended up voting in the ninth inconsequential California primary of the last 44 years. All the rhetoric of Sanders and Trump and Clinton was just so much noise because both Trump and Clinton had clinched their nominations long before a single California vote was counted.

          This makes a year when California’s votes actually mean something even more rare than a blue moon: those occur about twice a year when two full moons occur in the same month.

          As things stand, there is no reason to believe the California primary will matter much more for the next 40 years, either, because the early June date comes so late in the presidential selection process. So it’s mandatory that Californians who want to matter start now on pressuring their state legislators to move the vote up, or resign themselves to more primaries that are loud charades like this spring’s.

          California can’t vote first because rules of both major parties forbid any state from holding caucuses ahead of Iowa’s early January date or primaries before New Hampshire’s in early February.

          Justifications for this are mostly financial. Candidates don’t have to raise as much money to compete in small places like the first two states, plus other early stops in South Carolina and Nevada.  No one seriously argues those states are anything like representative of the entire nation, demographically or in any other way. So why should they perpetually be allowed to winnow down the field of candidates?

          That’s what they did this year, as possibilities like former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, ex-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and onetime California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina, among many others, fell by the wayside early on.

          What if California had inserted itself into the process on Feb. 23, the day Nevada Republicans caucused? That was a week before the March 1 so-called Super Tuesday when states voting included Arkansas, Colorado, Tennessee, Minnesota, Massachusetts and Texas.

          Had California moved up, many other states would have chosen the same day or even a date one week earlier, giving candidates very little time to celebrate or recuperate from the Feb. 9 New Hampshire vote.

          What’s wrong with that? Candidates would have had to campaign here long before they actually did. This could have compressed the primary calendar, but by the time February was over, a truly representative sample of America would have voted, and a lot of energy expended (wasted?) since then might have been obviated.

          That’s essentially what happened in a couple of election cycles of the 1990s and 2000s, when California’s vote came early and helped decide things quickly. For sure, Californians’ votes would count more earlier than they have in any June presidential primary since 1972, when Democrat George McGovern took the Democratic nomination by winning here.

          But the current setup is convenient for state politicians, who would face a far earlier filing deadline than this year’s March 9 (a week later for offices whose occupants aren’t running for reelection) if the primary were moved up.

An earlier filing deadline would force decision-making as early as December and accelerate the fund-raising calendar. That’s if California chose not to have two primaries, as it could: an early vote for president and the traditional June date for other offices.

          State lawmakers who have long kept California impotent in presidential selection hide behind the added cost of doing this, about $100 million. But in a state budget of $200 billion, that cost is less than peanuts. Isn’t it worth something to get Californians feeling involved, even inspired? Sanders did that to some extent this spring, even if he was mathematically eliminated long before the polls closed here.

The bottom line: the fact that candidates actually staged rallies all over the state is no excuse to leave things the same.

         

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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

IF NOT ISLA VISTA, WHAT CAN KEEP GUNS FROM MENTALLY ILL?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JUNE 24, 2014 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “IF NOT ISLA VISTA, WHAT CAN KEEP GUNS FROM MENTALLY ILL?”

          As the round of memorial services for the six students fatally stabbed and shot in late May by the psychotic killer Elliot Rodger recedes into memory, a serious public policy question remains even while families and friends are left with their private grief:

          If the Isla Vista killings can’t spur laws to keep guns away from persons diagnosed as mentally ill, what can?

          It now seems likely that despite some big talk from U.S. senators immediately after Rodger’s murderous spree on the edge of the UC Santa Barbara campus, there is little chance the federal government will do much. There may be more of a possibility for action by the state Legislature, far less influenced by the National Rifle Assn. and the gun lobby, but even there it’s unrealistic to expect anything.

          One thing for sure: Every legal expert agrees that Rodger bought his guns legally, despite  having a mental illness diagnosis. One therapist described him as pre-psychotic. On the day he decided to prove – in his own words – that he was a true “alpha male,” the prefix came off his diagnosis and he was just plain psychotic, which Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines as “having…a very serious mental illness that makes you act strangely or believe things that are not true.”

          Law professors consulted after the killings said such a diagnosis does not generally affect a person’s ability to own a gun, even in California, with some of America’s toughest gun controls.

          Rodger, with no criminal record, never previously having threatened anyone (except in the You Tube videos which were mostly ignored), never having been deemed a risk to himself or others and no history of addiction, raised no red flags when purchasing semiautomatic handguns.

          Another certainty in this case: The fact that Rodger stabbed his first few victims demonstrates that no matter what controls are put on guns, violent people can still find ways to kill.

          But there’s no reason to make it easy for them. That’s why Democratic U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said immediately after Isla Vista that he would try to revive gun legislation which failed to pass in the aftermath of the 2012 murders of 20 schoolchildren in Newtown, CT.

          Blumenthal said that if Congress fails to take at least most guns from the mentally ill, it will be complicit in future shootings.

          This, of course, raises many civil liberties questions: Should a person be deprived of Second Amendment rights if he or she has never threatened anyone or been deemed a threat to himself or herself? Should police have the right to search for weapons in the homes and cars of every mentally ill person, even if those persons appear to be “quiet and timid,”  as Rodger was described by sheriff’s deputies who visited him shortly before his spree? How can police determine a gun owner is mentally ill when they’re not mental health professionals? How can they tell if, like Rodger, someone has refused to take prescribed anti-psychotic medication?

          Blumenthal said his legislation would allow for these questions and deploy “professionals trained in diagnosing and preventing this kind of derangement.” California’s Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein proposed also letting families ask a court to temporarily prohibit gun purchases based on a credible risk of physical harm to self and others.

          All that, of course, gets stiff opposition from the gun lobby, which calls these ideas “an affront to Americans’ basic rights.”

          The top priority, though, has to be preservation of human life. In the last 14 years, there have been more mass killings of the Newtown/Isla Vista/Virginia Tech sort in this country than in the rest of the world combined. The vast majority of lives taken came via shootings.

          Which means something is amiss. Does that mean no person in psychotherapy should have a gun? Does it mean police should have the right to question every gun owner?

          Probably not. But if mental illness is the common denominator in mass killings from the Texas Tower to Newtown, Columbine and Isla Vista, then it’s high time to make it much harder for the mentally ill to acquire firearms of any kind, no matter how carefully laws doing this must be crafted.

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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

MAKING A HOSTAGE OF CALIFORNIA’S BEST PLACES

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JUNE 24, 2011, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“MAKING A HOSTAGE OF CALIFORNIA’S BEST PLACES”

Budget deficits have threatened California’s state parks – among the finest places with which nature has gifted this state – for several years, with annual threats to cut their operating budgets or even close them down.

Under most plans, only those parks that produce enough revenue to pay for their own maintenance and ranger staffing are assured they’ll never be closed. That includes some state beach parks where parking and camping fees produce substantial revenues and a very few others, like the Pt. Lobos Reserve State Park outside Carmel.

But the fate of scores of other parks and historic sites continues to depend on the way the political winds might blow on a particular day. Right now, closing is on the table for 70 parks. That’s just plain wrong.

For if we allow politicians to deprive California citizens of the best this state has to offer, then we enable them as they send the state down a primrose path to second- or third-class stature.

Many roadside rest areas along California highways are already shut for financial reasons. This means there are no longer many non-commercial places for drivers to catch breathers and perhaps picnic, even on the state’s most sleep-inducing roads, like Interstate 5 between Grapevine and Stockton or U.S. 99 from Bakersfield to Modesto.

The seemingly perpetual budget battles in Sacramento have already cut into the summer planning of many thousands. It’s much tougher to plan a vacation while unsure which parks might be open and which closed.

Wrote Elizabeth Goldstein, president of the private, non-profit California State Parks Foundation, “With every financial cut to the state parks’ budget, there have been subtle and not-so-subtle changes, (resulting) in a system that has less human presence and is substantially less well taken care of (than previously).”

So what happens if and when most state park personnel are laid off? Do marijuana-growing cartels move into places like Pfeiffer-Big Sur or Kruse Rhododendron state parks – fabulously gorgeous places that happen to be almost perfectly suited for cultivating pot? With fewer park rangers, do we get booby traps set by such outlaw operations?

Goldstein told members of her group she’s seen park employees “find ways to keep on moving forward as their resources keep getting smaller. They’ve been masters as doing more with less. But there is always a moment when less is nothing but less.”

What’s more, there is no assurance that any budget cuts made now will ever be restored. So precious resources where Californians have headed for generations to renew and relax may disappear.

Into this sad situation this spring came a proposal by Republican state Sen. Sam Blakeslee of San Luis Obispo to give counties and cities a chance to take over closed state parks for one year to five years. It aimed to encourage them to recruit volunteers to do work not done by sophisticated, trained professionals.

At the same time, his fellow Republican state Sen. Tom Harman of Orange County proposed allowing the privatizing of parks in order to keep them open. Democrats voted down both bills, but left open the possibility of doing what the measures called for.

Those votes came because both bills raised concerns that Republicans, who often have sought to privatize state services, might try to take whole units out of the state park system forever and give them to private companies (read: GOP campaign donors).

Harman and Blakeslee denied this, saying there was nothing in their measures forcing the state to let anyone take over parks, but only a requirement that the state listen to offers. Yet, worry persisted that even if park takeover agreements appear temporary at first, they could eventually become permanent, dooming the state’s most pleasant places to either unskilled management or commercial exploitation.

All this is just plain wrong. Because a few lawmakers have refused to allow a popular vote on Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposal to extend the small income, sales and vehicle license tax increases agreed to in 2009, many thousands of Californians could be deprived of one of the major joys of their lives.

Of course, those same Californians last year turned down a ballot measure setting up an $18 vehicle license fee surcharge to fund state parks.

So it’s not only politicians who have made state parks a political football, kicked around at the risk of destroying some of the most precious and delicate resources and opportunities California can offer. Voters are also to blame for putting some of the finest places in California at risk.

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Elias is author of the current book "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It," now available in an updated second edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com