By Timm Herdt, THE VENTURA COUNTY STAR
Joe Mathews, a New America Foundation senior fellow who studies and writes about direct democracy around the globe, believes this has been a history-making week in the world of ballot propositions.
“Proposition 16,” he said Wednesday, “belongs in the Hall of Fame Of all-time bad initiatives.”
Despite a $46.5 million campaign in support of an initiative written, sponsored by and almost entirely funded by Pacific Gas & Electric Co., California voters rejected Proposition 16 on Tuesday, 52.5 percent to 47.5 percent. It was turned down in 33 of the state’s 58 counties, most strongly in the heart of the Northern California utility company’s service area.
All this despite the fact that PG&E outspent the opposition by a ratio of 465-to-1.
It was one of two single-company-sponsored initiatives to go down. Proposition 17, sponsored by Mercury General Insurance Co. to the tune of $16 million, was defeated 52.1 percent to 47.9 percent.
Mathews said the results could have been foretold. “There’s not a long history of voters carving out specific protections for specific industries,” he said.
The most recent previous example, he noted, was voters’ rejection in 2008 of a T. Boone Pickens-sponsored initiative that would have authorized California to sell $5 billion in bonds to buy specific clean-fuel vehicles that would have been powered by a fuel sold chiefly by Pickens’ company.
Opponents of the measures celebrated Wednesday and praised California voters for their ability to evaluate the initiatives independently and not be swayed by the one-sided barrage of advertising funded by PG&E and Mercury.
“Voters are a lot smarter than self-serving corporations think or hope, or the political consultants who sell their services to these corporations claim,” said Doug Heller of Consumer Watchdog, the group that led the campaign to defeat Proposition 17.
Proposition 16 was sold to voters in relentless television and radio advertisements as the “Taxpayers Right to Vote Act,” and would have required local governments to first get approval from two-thirds of their voters before spending any public money to form a public power authority or create an electricity-buying cooperative for local residents.
But in remarks to investors this spring, CEO Peter Darbee said the objective was to dissuade local governments from even considering the idea. By diminishing the number of elections on such questions, he said, PG&E would save money over time by not having to wage repeated local campaigns to defeat such proposals.
The company could not persuade the two other in-state utility companies to go along with the campaign. Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric did not support Proposition 16.
PG&E officials laid out the costs of what they intended to spend on Proposition 16, and explained to shareholders that it would be a good investment of their money.
Richard Stapler, spokesman for the campaign to defeat Proposition 16, said it’s likely that Darbee spent much of Wednesday “reading and re-reading the golden parachute clause in his contract.”
For its $46.5 million, Stapler said, “PG&E bought half a generation of bad corporate image for itself.”
In a terse statement issued early Wednesday, the Proposition 16 campaign acknowledged defeat. “Though we believe people should still have a voice in their communities about whether local governments should spend taxpayer dollars to go into the retail electricity business, it’s clear that these issues will need to be addressed community by community,” the statement said.
Critics said one of the primary motivations of Proposition 16 was to prevent communities from taking advantage of a 2001 law that permits local governments to take advantage of a process called “community choice aggregation,” allowing them to form electricity-buying cooperatives to provide residents a choice in selecting electricity providers.
Marin County and seven of its cities have formed the first such entity in the state, San Francisco is poised to follow suit, and other jurisdictions are studying the idea.
Environmental groups say these cooperatives will stimulate green-energy production. Bill Magavern, director of Sierra Club California, hailed the defeat of Proposition 16 “because it would have thrown a huge obstacle into the path of affordable clean energy.”
Stapler, whose No on 16 group raised less than $100,000, said the only advertising it was able to afford was an e-mail blast to 300,000 high-propensity voters last week. It provided links to editorials from some of California’s major newspapers, all except two of which editorialized against the measure.
“It’s a huge testament to the fact that people were reading the newspaper and they were paying attention,” Stapler said.
therdt@VCStar.com
By Robert Cruickshank