The group that wants to oust San Diego Gas & Electric within the city limits of San Diego and replace it with a municipal utility failed to collect enough signatures to automatically put its proposal on the November ballot — but the group has submitted a sufficient number of signatures to keep its effort alive.
The San Diego City Clerk has confirmed the Power San Diego Campaign collected enough valid signatures to pose the question to the San Diego City Council.
When the council will take a vote to potentially place the petition on the ballot has not yet been determined, City Clerk Diana J.S. Fuentes said in an email to the Union-Tribune.
Bill Powers, who helped spearhead the campaign as chair of Power San Diego, put the news in football terms.
“Yes, it isn’t a touchdown, it isn’t directly to the ballot,” Power said. “We’ll call it a field goal. We’ve kept the issue in play.”
Keeping the metaphor going, the field goal barely made it over the crossbar.
To bring the question of creating an electric municipal utility to the city’s elected leaders, Power San Diego needed to collect signatures from 3 percent of the number of registered voters residing in the city of San Diego, which came to 24,006.
The group turned in almost 31,000 signatures to the San Diego County Registrar of Voters on May 14. As per California Elections Code, a random number of the signatures were examined, and the projected number of valid signatures on the petition came to 24,167 — a mere 161 signatures above the amount needed to take it to the council.
“Every signature counted,” Powers said. “Every time one of us was thinking about maybe not heading out (on a collection drive), we look back now and go, thank God we did.”
Under a provision in the San Diego City Charter, meeting the signature requirement means the nine members of the City Council have the power to put the creation of a municipal utility up for a popular vote this fall.
Power San Diego’s original goal was to collect roughly 80,000 valid signatures (or 10 percent of registered voters in the city), which would have been enough to put the creation of a municipal utility directly directly onto the ballot, according to the San Diego Municipal Code. But the signature drive fell well short of that threshold.
Opponents of the petition on Tuesday pointed to the fact that Power San Diego has already gone to City Hall twice seeking the council’s endorsem*nt of the initiative, only to be turned down — first by the City Council’s Environment Committee in September 2023, and then by the Rules Committee two months ago.
“Bottom line — this initiative is a very bad idea and comes with massive risks to the region,” said Matt Awbrey, spokesperson for Responsible Energy San Diego, a political action committee formed by groups opposed to the initiative, including SDG&E. “City officials have already rejected Power San Diego proposals twice before. Now that the proponents have failed to collect enough signatures to place this measure directly on the ballot, we remain hopeful the City Council will reject it yet again.”
The petition has also drawn firm opposition from the labor union that represents about 1,500 SDG&E employees. “It’s going to stick the city or this municipal entity with hundreds of millions of dollars of liability,” IBEW Local 465 business manager Nate Fairman said earlier this year.
Supporters of the Power San Diego campaign say labor contracts will be protected should a municipal utility be created, and that increasingly expensive power bills has led to a groundswell of opposition to SDG&E.
“We did quite well by raising $300,000 and getting more than 30,000 signatures with a team of coordinators and a lot of volunteers,” Power said. “There is a lot of discontent in our community over the behavior of our private, investor-owned utility.”
Under the Power San Diego proposal, the municipal utility would handle the electricity distribution responsibilities for customers strictly within the city limits of San Diego only — not in other municipalities in the county.
Petitioners say making the change will result in San Diego customers seeing about a 20 percent reduction in their electricity bills, citing how municipal utilities such as the Sacramento Municipal Utility District and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power offer customers lower rates than California’s investor-owned utilities — SDG&E, Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison.
Power San Diego estimates it would cost $3.5 billion to get a municipal power company up and running, which would work out to less than $15 per month per customer. Supporters predict there would be no incremental cost exposure to city ratepayers.
But released an assessment from an energy consulting firm that predicts the costs will come to much more than that — from $11.31 billion to $13.23 billion — and contends when the costs of financing a municipal utility from scratch are factored in, the total grows even higher.
Power San Diego called the estimates inflated and says the creation of a municipal electric utility could be funded by passing a bond to establish a standalone enterprise fund, with costs amortized over 30 years.
