Prop. 16 would be sweet for utilities

Prop. 16 would be sweet for utilities
By Dean Calbreath
San Diego Union-Tribune
May 16, 2010

For three years during the late 1990s, Michael Meacham, director of Chula Vista’s conservation and environmental services department, worked to craft a law that would make it easier for California’s municipalities to form their own power companies.

Since then, nearly 20 cities from the trendy suburbs of Marin County to the farmlands of the Central Valley have banded together to generate their own energy, breaking away from their former energy supplier, Pacific Gas & Electric.

But Meacham worries that those efforts might be endangered thanks to Proposition 16, a ballot initiative funded with $35 million from PG&E that would require municipalities to gain the approval of two-thirds of the voters before they create their own power companies...