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Utilities acted irresponsibly; why should consumers pay?
Editor:
On January 29, you reported that 22 business professors and self-styled “economics experts” had issued a “manifesto” on California’s electric-pricing crisis. Their key recommendation was to raise power rates, because “a retail rate freeze meant that consumers were buffered from the situation and did not conserve energy as they would have if rates rose....”
In other words, these business profs’ solution to high prices is higher prices.
With due respect for the authors’ expertise and years of service to the industry, their position is absurd. Even if consumers were (quite properly) insulated from manipulated wholesale price spikes last fall, utilities like PG&E knew for months that they were losing money on every kilowatt they purchased and resold.
One might have expected the economic geniuses who run these billion-dollar corporations to quickly reintroduce the conservation incentives they’d hastened to dismantle under deregulation: free home-energy audits, free compact fluorescent light bulbs (undercutting even Ikea’s $2.75 charge), and rebates for energy-efficient appliances.
But no.
As this week’s independent audits revealed, the utilities made no effort to conserve power demand, or even cash. Instead, they irresponsibly drove themselves into debt.
Much of the debt was paid to power-generating affiliates of the same holding companies, in the form of record profits. The holding companies distributed those profits as stock repurchases and dividends, then took complex financial steps to insulate themselves from responsibility for their own utilities’ debt. Now these holding companies are demanding that Sacramento make consumers bail them out for the same debt.
In other words, the power blowout is a manipulated scam from top to bottom. The utilities deserve no bailout and no mercy – it is their holding companies, not consumers, who need to be exposed to real wholesale power costs.
The only equitable way for the state to keep these rascals out of bankruptcy is to acquire their generating facilities and transmission lines. Public power will protect consumers from ever being scammed like this again.
Michael Katz
Berkeley
Bravo Planet
Editor:
Bravo to the Planet for being one of the only papers with the guts to cover the Anti-Inauguration demonstration in San Francisco.
While there will be a great tendency to marginalize the erstwhile small “Stop Corporate Greed” movement and characterize its style as fringe, it may be of greater interest to monitor its growth in the next four years, if the press will just do its job of reporting on it.
Thanks and keep up the good work!
Stephanie Manning
Berkeley
Units sans parking lets developers encroach on public spaces
Editor:
By allowing residential “units without parking” (UWP’s), and omitting a ground floor storage space or even an off-street loading area, the city is permitting developers to grossly encroach upon shared public spaces.
The several consequences of this will be that: a) trucks, cars, taxis or moving vans delivering or picking up at the site will be able to double park and hold up moving traffic on major streets during business hours; b) neighboring residential streets with an ever dwindling supply of all day parking will be host to drivers circling and searching for spaces; c) curb cuts for driveways will be blocked; d) autos will resort to front lawns, and
sidewalk parking, as is seen in countries where high-density UWP’s have been allowed. Already in Berkeley, high school tennis courts in the downtown area have been converted to parking.
At a downtown meeting sponsored by business people before the last election, all of the candidates for City Council were unanimous in stating in public, that the central business district needed more parking. If masses of UWP’s are built, the competition for parking spaces will discourage shoppers and patrons of the arts and entertainment from attempting to visit downtown, especially for late night events.
There is no possibility of enforcing a pledge by an owner or renter to be without a vehicle. I was surprised to read that the university sells parking permits to students for “on campus lots.” Couldn’t a student drive to a BART station nearest their home and take the train to Berkeley, and then use the “Class Pass” to go anywhere in town?
Some planners have been overly optimistic when urging high-density “transit corridor” development. Recent reports from bus commuters describe distinctly poor service, including bus runs cancelled without notice.
Martha Nicoloff
Berkeley
High density housing adds to traffic nightmare
Editor:
Richard Register’s Feb. 1 opinion piece championing the design, scale, and objectives of the Gaia Building, now under construction in downtown Berkeley certainly champions a host of laudable goals – but exudes a troubling odor of a self-interested, rose-tinted perspective.
I find it disturbing that he is content to see rules, with which he is in disagreement, bent or broken (e.g., the height limitations for which he asserts he has so little respect) when it serves his particular interests. Height limits are directly related to density of construction, of course, and on the subject of density his fantasy world seems to disconnect from a host of surrounding realities.
The principal discontinuity is that between his goal of higher and denser housing and the reality of a deepening traffic tsunami. It is nice to pitch car-free housing and sing the praises of taking the bus or BART, but such advocates have a poor record of engineering practical and effective plans to encourage such changes in mass habit. BART already functions (when it does) at capacity; the bus system is a labyrinthine nightmare of waiting and long-distance walks; and what authority would enforce car-free tenancy agreements?
Underlying these traffic and transit issues is the context that makes them intractable problems thus far: how do people get to where they need to go when their destination is beyond a reasonable walk?
Dramatically increasing density makes the question more difficult still. Ever denser construction adds to the transportation nightmare the Bay Area is already experiencing. That issue needs direct and effective address before the utopia of denser living will become a happy one. For decades the nuclear power industry built plants on the promise of providing a panacea of safe, cheap electricity and the assurance that a way would be found to dispose of the waste.
So far, they have proved both the promise and the assurance were a fantasy, and betrayed a responsible obligation to resolve the problem of waste disposal beforehand. Until real-world progress is made toward developing solutions to traffic and transportation issues in Berkeley, height limitations have their place and should be respected, not exceeded by subterfuge.
Howie Muir
Berkeley
