Fresno City Council postpones vote on energy option study after week of complaints
After a week of chatter, the Fresno City Council postponed a vote to conduct a feasibility study on alternatives to Pacific Gas & Electric to power the city.
The item is scheduled to come back to the City Council in December after councilmembers said at Thursday’s meeting that the proposal for the study needs more details.
Earlier this week, leaders from the city, county, education and building industry assembled for a news conference to put PG&E on notice for increased rates and delays in electrifying construction projects. The leaders said they’d support doing a study to determine if the city has other options to provide power to its residents.
However, some councilmembers on Thursday expressed concerns about the language used at the new conference, lack of details about the study’s scope and whether the county would partner on the study.
Council President Nelson Esparza, who also teaches community college economics classes, during the meeting pulled out his white board and drew a graph to explain the issue to his colleagues.
“I think pressure is good for PG&E. Accountability is good for PG&E. We’ve seen them be responsive to that. But I’m still trying to figure out how we went from zero to 100 in trying to figure out how to solve this particular problem,” Esparza said. “I heard about this delay issue from the builders industry on one day, and a few short days later, we have city officials turning the conversation toward a city-run utility.
“I think the bottom line is, for me at least, is that we don’t need to expend dollars on a study to tell us what we already know,” Esparza said. “That is that launching a municipal utility will come at extremely high costs, both in terms of dollars and bonding capacity, to the detriment of the crumbling infrastructure across our entire city.”
Councilmember Miguel Arias peppered City Manager Georgeanne White and Mayor Jerry Dyer with a number of questions they called “premature,” including the city’s bonding capacities, which models would be studied and if any city employees have experience providing energy to residents. Arias and Soria asked the mayor’s administration to include more details in the scope of the study.
Councilmember Luis Chavez said the council and mayor’s administration should focus on one question: “How would this directly help our residents?”
Public comment on the issue was mixed. Some people doubted the city’s ability to run a power utility and pointed to their dissatisfaction with other city services. Others agreed that PG&E rates were too high and said they’d like another option.
Ultimately, the councilmembers on a split vote directed the administration to return in the first week of December with more information. Councilmembers Arias, Esparza, Mike Karbassi and Esmeralda Soria voted to postpone. Councilmembers Garry Bredefeld, Chavez and Tyler Maxwell voted against postponing the vote.