IID scores initial win in legal battle with Riverside County

LOS ANGELES — A County Superior Court judge here on Tuesday granted a preliminary injunction preventing the county of Riverside from implementing an ordinance that, if enacted, would bypass the authority of the Imperial Irrigation District to set electric rates for its customers, according to an IID press release.

In granting the injunction, Judge Mary Strobel found that the county’s ordinance conflicts with state law and, if enacted, would cause irreparable harm to the district, Frank Oswalt, IID general counsel, reported.

Although no final rulings were made, Oswalt said the court determined that there was a likely probability that IID would prevail if the matter were fully contested, according to IID. Further, should the ordinance be enacted, the IID board and staff would be irreparably harmed by the prescribed criminal penalties in the ordinance, and the district harmed by the millions of dollars in unrecoverable costs to implement it, according to the district release.

In June, the Riverside County Board of Supervisors approved Ordinance No. 943, which would have required IID to scrap its publicly vetted and board-adopted solar tariff, net-energy billing and create a new solar tariff that closely resembles that of a privately owned utility, Southern California Edison.

All this came at the request of a private business owner whose business is located in Riverside County and stands to directly benefit financially from the impacts of this ordinance, according to the IID. The district is referring to Renova Energy owner Vincent Battaglia.

“The notion that Riverside County would usurp IID’s ratemaking authority and adopt an ordinance that violates state law is inherently unreasonable and unprecedented,” said James Hanks, IID board president. “Today’s action by the court is a win for the district and its ratepayers.”

In making her ruling, Judge Strobel also noted several potential areas in which the county’s ordinance may conflict with the Public Utilities Act. Among those areas are:

“First and most critically, section 2827 (of the Public Utilities Act) provides that a [public owned utility], such as the petitioner (IID), is not required to offer NEM (net-energy metering) programs beyond its 5 percent participation cap provided for under that statute,” the judge wrote. “The ordinance directly conflicts with this general law because it imposes NEM requirement on [IID] ‘as expansive’ as NEM 2.0, which does not have this participation cap.”

Second, the same section defines the ratemaking authority of a publicly owned utility as the board of that utility. “That board has the authority to determine when … the utility is not obligated to provide NEM to additional customer-generators. … The ordinance, in contrast, grants [Riverside County] the authority to regulate [IID’s] rates for NEM credits, and it purports to regulate [IID’s] NEM activities as if it were an [investor-owned utility] under the ratemaking authority of the [California Public Utilities Commission],” the judge wrote in her decision.

Riverside County officials did not comment when contacted by the Imperial Valley Press.

Recently, IID alleged Riverside County was in violation of California’s open meetings law, the Brown Act, when Riverside officials “lined up votes” outside of the public’s purview on Ordinance 943.

What’s more, due to the alleged Brown Act violations, the district sent a letter from one of its attorneys demanding that the ordinance in question be rescinded or that Riverside County face additional legal challenges from the district. From the date of the letter, Oct. 12, the IID has given Riverside County 30 days to respond or be subject to legal action.