/Photo: Brant Ward / The Chronicle
If PG&E becomes a public entity, maybe then it will start keeping the public’s interest in the forefront. As stocks drop, fires ravage the state, and anger mounts, it could be in the best interest of the state and utility company
By Michael Hiltzik | Los Angeles Times
Critics of public sector inefficiencies have long declared that “government should be run like a business.”
A business such as, say, Pacific Gas & Electric?
The current wildfire crisis in California should serve as an object lesson in the folly of expecting private enterprise to operate in the service of the public interest. It’s common to hear ordinary taxpayers grousing about the DMV as a proxy for all that’s burdensome and irritating about bureaucracy.
But the electricity shutoffs across the state, aimed at reducing the chance that a spark from utility equipment will start a fire, are the handiwork of our private utilities, artifacts of their failure to spend more money on their infrastructure rather than shareholder dividends.
Federal Judge William Alsup of San Francisco, who is overseeing PG&E’s probation following its criminal conviction in connection with the 2010 gas line explosion that killed eight in San Bruno, implicitly acknowledged as much in an order last January. In his order, Alsup tasked the company to “remove or trim all trees that could fall onto its power lines” as well as “identify and fix all conductors that might swing together and arc … under high-wind conditions,” among other steps that the company had been expected to take under existing law. Alsup observed that California fire authorities blamed PG&E for 18 wildfires in 2017 and referred 12 of them for possible criminal prosecution.
