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To all the WarRoom posters and mods who live in California, get out while you still can.
Lmao.
To all the WarRoom posters and mods who live in California, get out while you still can.
Because it costs around 2 to 11 million or so per mile to dig an place the lines. I live in Massachusetts an one town did just one street and decided it was to expensive. To do all of California everywhere would cost likely 10's of billions or more.Why don’t they bury the lines?
Add an increase to the bill to pay for it. Once paid drop the extra fee.
Bootstraps?God forbid the state take over PG&E. That's communism.
What California needs to do is hand billions in tax payer funded bailouts to the company to help make it whole again. That's the free enterprise solution. And the only right answer.
Cities with residents and businesses still reeling from PG&E’s decision to repeatedly shut off power for customers across California in October are set to see some relief.
San Jose, Oakland and other major cities will each get $500,000 to help cover the costs of the power shutoffs that left millions of residents in the dark last month.
The money is part of a $75 million state fund mayors and other city officials can use to pay for generators or other backup energy supplies to keep crucial services like fire stations and hospitals up and running even when power is off.
PG&E has said it needs to cut power during hot, windy weather to prevent wildfires from sparking. The utility has been blamed for causing a series of wildfires across the state in recent years. Yet it may not have been enough. Officials are investigating whether the powerful Kincade Fire that threatened to level the towns of Healdsburg and Windsor in recent days may have been sparked by the company’s faulty equipment.
On Friday, San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo thanked the state, specifically state Sen. Jim Beall, who joined him for a news conference at City Hall, for allocating the funding to local governments.
“Resiliency is the key word for every local community,” Liccardo said.
But both men blasted the utility company for failing to do enough to prevent the shutoffs in the first place.
“We’re disappointed in the management and operation of PG&E,” Beall said. “We’re finally at the end of our rope and we want something done about it.”
The company has said it could take a decade before it can make enough improvements to its infrastructure that it doesn’t need to rely on shutdowns to preemptively prevent fires. Beall said that was not acceptable.
“No, we want them to do it in three years,” the senator said. “I think they have to focus on dealing with their equipment and maintenance on their equipment immediately.”
In San Jose, Liccardo said he wants to use some of the funding to build up microgrids that could help power the city during future power outages.
“We are going all in,” the mayor said.
Setting up such a system would take significant time and more than half a million dollars. The first shutoff alone cost San Jose about that much, Liccardo said. And the money and supplies restaurants and businesses that had to shutter during the shutdowns lost adds up to even more.
“The bill is going to be much larger to get to the resilience we all want,” Liccardo said.
Liccardo said he also wants to explore reorganizing PG&E into a customer-owned utility, like a credit union, blasting the company for giving executives millions of dollars in bonuses even as it filed for bankruptcy and saddled residents with costly bills for unreliable service.
But, as Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement announcing the funds, the money is a first step. Each county in the state will get at least $150,000. In addition to San Jose and Oakland, Los Angeles and San Diego will also each get $500,000.
“PG&E failed to maintain its infrastructure and Californians are facing hardship as a result,” Newsom said. “For decades, they have placed greed before public safety. We must do everything we can to support Californians, especially those most vulnerable to these events. These funds will help local governments address these events and assist their most vulnerable residents.”
Liccardo said he would be “pushing for more” in the next budget cycle. And Beall said the state Senate has put together a task force set to meet in mid-November to explore how to address the issue moving forward. In the coming year, he said, the state will need to do everything from thin forests to fight climate change and pollution to combat wildfires and the effects they have on residents.
“We’re going to begin to discuss where we can go from here,” Beall said, adding that the aim is to piece together “a strong utility system in California.”
In a new blog post on Friday, Newsom said the state deserves world-class utilities that are safe, affordable and environmentally friendly. Next week, the governor will gather PG&E executives, shareholders, wildfire victims and others in Sacramento to “accelerate a consensual resolution to the bankruptcy cases that creates a new entity — one that better reflects California values and will advance massive safety transformations beginning before next fire season.”
If that doesn’t happen, Newsom warned, “the state will not hesitate to step in and restructure the utility.”
Lmao.
northern california has 4 national parksI've been to Northern California. Not a fan. Good luck guys.
Yea man. A flyover like Kansas is where everyone should go. LmaoFor every post you make while in California, Revolver, you sound poorer and poorer.
Get out before you sound homeless!
Yea man. A flyover like Kansas is where everyone should go. Lmao
You’re better than this. Actually no you’re not. Enjoy your shithole. Lmao.Fuck no.
If everyone came here, it turn into a worse shithole than California.
You’re better than this. Actually no you’re not. Enjoy your shithole. Lmao.
The mayors of Oakland, Sacramento and more than a dozen other California municipalities are joining San Jose in a campaign to buy out the investor-owned PG&E Corp. PCG 13.06% and turn it into a giant customer-owned cooperative.
The idea, first floated last month by San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, is winning support from mayors and county commissioners who represent approximately one-quarter of the population served by PG&E’s utility subsidiary, Pacific Gas & Electric Co.
The coalition plans to deliver a letter Tuesday to the California Public Utilities Commission and Gov. Gavin Newsom asking that such an option receive fair and full consideration before the state approves any bankruptcy reorganization plan. The company filed for chapter 11 protection in January, citing an estimated $30 billion in wildfire liabilities.
PG&E has adamantly opposed the sale of any part of its system. Chief Executive Bill Johnson last month rejected an offer by San Francisco to buy the portion of PG&E’s electric network that is within city limits for $2.5 billion.
Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg said in an interview that his city, which has its own electric utility but relies on PG&E for gas service, has to start considering alternatives.
“I’m signing on in solidarity with my fellow mayors whose constituents are suffering under PG&E,” said Mr. Steinberg, a Democrat who formerly led the state senate. He added that his city enjoys “the benefit of electricity being a public commodity and overseen by people who are accountable to the public.”
Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs said that his constituents worry about power shut-offs by PG&E whenever “the wind picks up.” He said that creating a customer-owned utility “allows us to put people ahead of profits, safety ahead of dividends and local control ahead of corporate rule.”
Last week, Mr. Newsom named Ana Matosantos, his cabinet secretary, as the state’s new “energy czar.” He instructed her to try to broker a deal between PG&E’s shareholders and bondholders—who are fighting for control of the company—to enable the company to exit bankruptcy by the middle of next year. If the sides cannot find agreement, California may intervene and pursue other options, including a state takeover of PG&E, Mr. Newsom said.
The Democratic governor is scheduled to meet with representatives for the different stakeholders in the bankruptcy case Tuesday morning, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Liccardo, San Jose’s mayor, said that public officials in the coalition feel that the existing bankruptcy reorganization plans are unlikely to produce a utility strong enough to fulfill the state’s need for reliable, affordable service.
“The governor has opened a door for us, by getting directly involved,” Mr. Liccardo said. “That means we have an opportunity to see a reorganized utility emerge that doesn’t just fulfill the legal requirements under bankruptcy law but could address the larger public need for a more responsive utility.”
Under the coalition’s buyout proposal, bonds worth as much as $50 billion would be sold to finance a buyout of the big utility, whose territory spreads across 70,000 square miles of Northern and Central California. Customers would repay bonded indebtedness through their monthly energy bills.
A customer-owned utility would set its own rates but would be subject to safety rules set by federal and state officials. Profits from utility operations would be reinvested in the utility’s gas-and-electric networks, not paid out to shareholders as dividends. The utility paid out roughly $7 billion in dividends in the past decade, Mr. Liccardo said, whereas “a model that aligns financial interests with the public interest of our communities is deeply desired by all of us.”
In a draft of their letter reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, coalition members said they are not pursuing public ownership because of “mere anger or angst” at PGE’s power shut-offs but because they think the utility has to be “re-imagined.”
The coalition wrote that the bankruptcy proceeding has resulted in a clash between Wall Street investor groups that has produced a “spectacle, without regard for what will be left behind when the financial players inevitably leave the scene.”
“We face the need for a completely re-engineered and reconstructed system to adapt to the realities of climate change and poorly maintained infrastructure,” the letter to the CPUC and Gov. Newsom states. “PG&E cannot meet these challenges if it stumbles out of bankruptcy, barely able to raise capital, and suffering prohibitive costs.”
In addition to San Jose, Oakland and Sacramento, Mr. Liccardo said the coalition has garnered support from mayors representing Berkeley, Cotati, Elk Grove, Hayward, Petaluma, Richmond, Santa Cruz, Scotts Valley, Sonoma, Stockton, Sunnyvale and Windsor. He said commissioners from Marin, Santa Cruz, San Benito and Yolo counties also are supporters.
It'll be worse if the state takes over. I'm a union worker and us and state employees are about the same when it comes to laziness and incompetence. We want to get paid the most amount of money doing the least amount of work possible. And we want pension after we put in our 20 years. Not just regular pensions, but A-class pensions. Only difference is the state will charge you more.
similar in a sense to cops. They hate us til they need us. When hurricane sandy hit in NY oh boy did they need us. Begging after a few days of outages.
although it is weird that we make the most money during other people’s misery but it is what it is. We did 16 hour days 7 days a week for months. I saw guys checks who were making much more then time and they taking home 15-20k a week. I was like 6-7k. Was great. Love Mother Nature
they also pay us for what we know not exactly how much we do. Utilities are serious biz