It’s fair to say that public power agencies are taking the state by storm. They are known as community choice aggregators, or CCAs. Dozens of cities across the state are talking about parting ways with their local power companies. Eight other local governments, mostly in Northern California, already have.
A group of San Diego business and civic leaders announced Thursday they have formed a coalition to question a move toward community choice energy, which would allow San Diego’s municipal government to acquire power separately from the local utility. The Clear the Air Coalition includes former Mayor Jerry Sanders, currently president and CEO of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, Frank Urtasun of Sempra Energy, and Joe Panetta, who leads the life sciences industry trade group Biocom, among others.
Water agencies across California are preparing to vote on a massive new water project, but unanswered questions remain. Known as WaterFix or the twin tunnels project, it’s designed to ensure that water keeps coming south through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta, a series of waterways and wetlands fed by snow melting in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has determined that the 60-year-old Whittier Narrows Dam is structurally unsafe and poses a potentially catastrophic risk to the working-class communities along the San Gabriel River floodplain. According to an agency report based on research conducted last year, unusually heavy rains could trigger a premature opening of the dam’s massive spillway.
The city of San Diego is standing by its new water meters despite resident complaints of skyrocketing bills without leaks. “I am absolutely confident that these meters are reading accurately,” said Michael Vogl, the city’s public utilities deputy director, who oversees water billing. Families from Mountain View to Scripps Ranch have contacted 10News to complain of the high bills, some doubling or tripling to more than $1,000. They say they’ve never had bills that high and that they or their plumbers haven’t found a leak. So many have concluded that the city’s water meters are off.
The clock is ticking as the Brown administration presses public water agencies to make a final decision on whether to fund the proposed California “WaterFix” project, a plan to construct two 40-foot diameter, 35-mile long tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Though the $17 billion tunnel project really fixes nothing, some water agencies claim the project is the only viable option to get water to their communities and are poised to pass the huge costs onto their customers.
Three years ago, I was pleased to join San Diego leaders at a ceremony dedicating the San Vicente Dam Raise, a $416 million project that marked the single largest increase in water storage in San Diego County history. The project and others such as the state-of-the-art desalination facility at Carlsbad are key components of a water portfolio that demonstrates the region’s commitment to long-term water security.
San Diego’s Rose Canyon fault is capable of producing a magnitude 6.9 earthquake that could kill 2,000 people and inflict $40 billion in property damage, according to a preliminary study sponsored by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute. The EERI team also says in the study to be made public on Wednesday that the quake could cause an offshore canyon to collapse, producing a tsunami that would swamp the Silver Strand and send waves surging into San Diego Bay.
In 1999, the state Legislature made the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California create an ethics office. Metropolitan, the main supplier of San Diego’s water, had just been caught up in an ethically questionable public relations campaign aimed at blocking the San Diego County Water Authority from buying water from someone else. Now, that ethics office – rather than mediating the long-running feud between the Water Authority and Metropolitan – has become another tool in the fight.
The Metropolitan Water District’s embattled ethics watchdog announced her resignation Tuesday amid a monthslong internal struggle over her office and its investigations. Ethics officer Deena Ghaly informed the MWD of her decision hours before the agency’s 38-member board was scheduled to evaluate her performance. Ghaly, whose office is the subject of an ongoing outside review, said it had become “impossible” for her to carry out her duties of creating, administering and enforcing ethics rules.
