Governor slams firm for crisis, tells voters resolution will take time
Gov. Gavin Newsom blames PG&E’s mismanagement for blackouts that have shut off power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses across California, saying that for decades the huge utility chose profit over people.
“It’s decisions that were not made that have led to this moment in PG&E’s history in the state of California,” he said Thursday. He called it “a story about greed and mismanagement over the course of decades.”
But with stores closed, stoplights dark and frozen food thawing across Northern and Central California, will angry residents let Newsom shift the blame?
“Customers don’t care who the CEO of PG&E is or how many women they have on their board,” said Garry South, a top aide to thenGov. Gray Davis in the early 2000s, when Davis had his own problems with statewide blackouts. “They just want the power to go when they flip the switch.”
Newsom admitted that nothing was going to happen in a hurry.
“There’s no magic wand here,” he said at an evening news conference at the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services outside Sacramento.
The state is moving in the right direction and will force PG&E to make promised improvements, he said, but “to harden and upgrade 100,000 miles of line? Come on. That’s not going to happen in a week or two, even in a month or two, or a year or two.”
Promises that things will get better sometime in the vague future are not what people want to hear as they sit in the dark with no way to cook, recharge their cell phones or watch the baseball playoffs.
Politically, doing nothing in the short term can be disastrous, said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst and retired professor of public policy communications at the University of Southern California.
“In politics, perception is reality and that applies to the governor and certainly PG&E,” she said. Newsom “has to look like he’s doing something ... to resolve the problem.”
That can be summoning PG&E officials to Sacramento and calling them out, or suggesting that he would welcome proposals for bills that would ensure this never happens again, Jeffe said.
“Right now, it seems like there’s a leadership vacuum in Sacramento,” both from the governor and the Legislature, she said. “And what’s the purpose of government, if not to deal with problems like this?”
While Newsom talked tough Thursday, saying people shouldn’t be forced to choose between “safety and hardship,” he later admitted there isn’t always a way to avoid that decision.
Cutting power during red flag fire conditions is part of the “best industry practices” for electric utilities, the governor said, and if PG&E had shut down power lines before the Woolsey and Camp fires last year, lives would have been saved.
Newsom is already catching flak for the shutdowns.
“CA under @GavinNewsom has third world conditions on city streets so why not third world power interruption?” tweeted Republican John Cox, who lost to Newsom in the 2018 governor’s election.
“These blackouts are not due to circumstances, but a lack of focus, leadership and accountability under the Democrats’ watch,” said state Senate Republican leader Shannon Grove of Bakersfield, who called for the governor and Sacramento Democrats “to find solutions for their selfcreated mess.”
Democrats so far are casting the blame on PG&E, but if the blackouts continue that could quickly spill over onto Newsom.
“It’s hard to overstate the impact of this massive rolling blackout, affecting 2.5 million people,” tweeted San Francisco state Sen. Scott Wiener. “People rely on electricity for their medicine, their food & their livelihoods. This is a completely unacceptable state of affairs. We can’t let PG&E normalize these mass blackouts.”
Just because there may not be any good answers to the power woes doesn’t mean Newsom shouldn’t try, but it’s important that he be honest with Californians, said Barbara O’Connor, retired professor of political speech at Sacramento State University.
“As governor, he needs to say that he’s made new appointments to the Public Utilities Commission, that he’s going to listen to the experts and that he’s suffering, too,” she said.
Newsom took a stab at that Wednesday, but couched it in terms of how blackouts were hurting the wineries that are part of a multimilliondollar business empire he put into a blind trust when he was elected. It wasn’t something most voters could relate to.
He changed that tone Thursday, talking instead about children who can’t get to school and homeowners who can’t even raise their garage doors.
Newsom also said the state was providing personnel to help PG&E speed up its equipment inspections and would hold the company to the timeline of a recent law that is intended to get the utility out of bankruptcy by the end of June. The law will require annual state safety certifications of PG&E’s system.
PG&E’s shutoffs could be an opportunity for Newsom to take California in a new energy direction, said Jamie Court of Consumer Watchdog.
“Newsom can’t fix this overnight, but he can show that he’s going to be tougher than (former Govs.) Davis and (Jerry) Brown,” Court said. That could include breaking up PG&E, supporting cities like San Francisco that want to run their own power systems and signaling “that when (PG&E) shuts down power, if it’s not done thoughtfully, it will lead to managers going to jail,” he said.
But Newsom also has to worry about the company’s financial health, since none of the system’s longrunning problems will get fixed if PG&E goes bust.
South said it’s a dilemma Davis also had to face as his governorship spiraled into a blackoutfueled crisis.
“You have to be tough, but you can’t do things publicly that might make the company collapse,” South said.
Newsom is walking a narrow path, with disaster on both sides. If he forces PG&E and other utilities to trim back the blackouts, he gets the blame for any new wildfires caused by power lines falling in windstorms. If he lets the shutdowns continue and even widen, he’ll face voters outraged at the personal price they are paying.
The governor only has to look at Davis’ experience to see the potential political costs of an electricity emergency.
In 2000 and 2001, blackouts caused by electricity shortages rolled across California, affecting millions of customers and forcing Davis to declare a state of emergency. He argued that the problems were caused by national energy companies like Enron manipulating the electricity market, thanks to a deregulation system lawmakers had set up several years earlier.
It was all too complicated for the public, which zeroed in on one identifiable person they could blame — the governor.
Davis’ largely passive reaction to the blackouts was a big part of why he was ousted from office in a 2003 recall election and replaced by Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Newsom pleaded this week for time to work on the blackouts.
“I just got here,” he said. “I’m trying to solve decades of problems.”
That’s an argument that didn’t work for Davis, and voters haven’t become any more forgiving since then.