Employees on gas side of utility wined and dined before mass power shutdowns
As their colleagues prepared for an unprecedented forced power outage to millions of people across California, executives from the natural gas side of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. thought they had something more important to do: wining and dining on the company dime, The Chronicle has learned.
PG&E confirmed that 10 to 12 employees on the gas side of the business were mingling with 50 to 60 of their top cus
tomers at a winery in Sonoma County on Monday and Tuesday. It was in the runup to PG&E’s unprecedented power shutoffs for hundreds of thousands of customers this week, a highly controversial act that could cost the California economy $2.6 billion by some estimates and even put people in harm’s way.
For those living near the posh venue, Tuesday had another meaning. Two years earlier, PG&E power poles ignited a series of deadly and destructive wildfires across Wine Country — including blazes that burned in Sonoma County.
Bill Johnson, CEO of the utility’s parent company PG&E Corp., admitted to the event in an exclusive interview with The Chronicle on Thursday. He described it as a colossal mistake in poor taste and promised it would never happen again.
“I want to apologize to every one of our customers,” Johnson said. “Insensitive, inappropriate, tone deaf are the terms I would use to describe this.”
Johnson was not at the event and said he learned of it only “recently” — after a reporter began asking questions. Had he been aware before, Johnson said he “would have stopped it.”
The event this week took place at the Silver Oak Winery north of Healdsburg, according to PG&E. Guests had “dinner and a wine tasting,” Johnson said. A representative of the winery did not respond to a message from The Chronicle on Thursday.
Among those in attendance was Mel Christopher, the company’s top gas executive. He was promoted to run PG&E’s longtroubled gas side this year following the departure of Jesus Soto, who had been senior vice president of gas operations.
Soto left about one month after Johnson joined PG&E in May. At the time, Johnson said he had been able to “review and assess our team and organization and have determined some changes for our path forward together.”
Though much of PG&E’s recent corporate problems have been confined to the electric side of its business — the company’s power lines started many of the October 2017 fires in Wine Country and the 2018 Camp Fire — its gas operations have had serious issues of their own.
A PG&E gas line in San Bruno exploded in 2010, killing eight people and destroying 38 homes. More recently, the company agreed to a $65 million settlement with state regulators who found that PG&E employees repeatedly falsified certain internal records about their efforts to locate and mark underground natural gas lines.
The Sonoma County event threatens to deal another blow to the PG&E gas division.
David Rabbitt, the chairman of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, called the timing of the PG&E retreat “incredibly insensitive.”
“Obviously, I take it that those who arranged this were not from Sonoma and not in tune with the way that people feel in the county on that particular day,” he said.
State Sen. Jerry Hill, DSan Mateo, said the retreat showed how PG&E has clearly failed to learn the lessons of repeated failures on both the gas and electric sides of the business.
“This company is so out of touch with themselves, much less the communities they serve,” he said. “They don’t have a clue of what’s going on in California.”
Hill represents San Bruno and is a frequent PG&E critic. He called the Wine Country event “another arrow in the quiver” against PG&E, showing it is “not deserving to serve Californians as a monopolistic, investorowned utility.”
“It’s time that we look for an alternative,” he said.
PG&E officials said they did not have an estimate of how much its employees spent but stressed that ratepayer money was not used and it was financed using only funds reserved for shareholder profits.
Johnson said the event had been planned for a year, was about “appreciating their gas customers,” and the company had held similar events in the past. But he said that doesn’t absolve PG&E.
“We shouldn’t have done this, so I have told these folks and everybody else on the team we won’t be doing any more events like this ever,” Johnson said. “I do think it’s important to appreciate your customers. I think the way we do it is to speed up the time it takes to hook up a new customer, to make the service better, to make the price better . ... This event did happen, and I don’t believe it will happen again.”