Endorse AB48x energy bill

AB48x hearing was scheduled for Thursday March 15 has been delayed until NEXT WEEK.

No date has yet been set, I will let you know when I do.

If you have not yet faxed your signed Endorsement Letter for AB48x, fax it to me, Paul Fenn, at 925 377 0746

Please forward this notice to interested friends.

The story of this bill is below.

Paul Fenn
Local Power
4281 Piedmont Avenue
Oakland, California 94611
tel 510 451 1727
fax 925 377 0746
<http://www.local.org/>http://www.local.<http://www.local.org/>org

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SAMPLE LETTER

March 14, 2001

Assemblymember Carole Migden
Attn! Alan LoFaso, Chief of Staff
California Legislature
State Capitol
Sacramento, CA 95814
Tel 916 319 2013
Fax 916 319 2113

Dear Assemblymember Migden:

I am writing to endorse AB48x, the California Community Choice bill, authorizing and establishing procedures for local governments to aggregate their communities into city-negotiated energy contracts. The cities and counties of San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Marin County and Fairfax, as well as West Hollywood, Lomita, Carson, El Segundo, Hawthorne, Culver City, Lawndale and the Southern California Cities Joint Powers Consortium have each passed a resolution asking the Legislature for Community Choice.

To date, AB48x has been endorsed by San Francisco Board President Tom Ammiano, Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, Marin County Supervisor Hal Brown, the Southern California Cities Joint Powers Consortium (representing 10 Los Angeles municipalities), Oakland City Councilor Ignacio De La Fuente, TURN, CalPIRG, and Sustainable Fairfax, as well as Public Citizen, Mpassachusetts Representative Matthew Patrick, Ohio State Senators Priscilla Mead and Eric Fingerhut, Ohio Citizen Action, and the letters keep coming in.

While there is very broad support of this measure, its future viability is threatened by other well intentioned bills that unwittingly restore monopoly in the name of consumer protection. Moreover, we ask that you be vigilant to protect Community Choice from infringements contained in other legislation being put forward. Bills like SB27x and SB60x could compromise the future ability of communities to implement Community Choice, and the Governor\'s secret contracts with the suppliers should be limited to ensure that they do not create new \"stranded costs\" that are used against Community Choice cities to keep their customers captive to monopoly service.

We would particularly ask that you preserve language in the bill that gives communities the opportunity to apply to the state for moneys paid by their communities into the state energy efficiency and renewables surcharge funds, as these are essential to making Community Choice work for cities in the current dysfunctional wholesale market. It is also critical that the state\'s public benefits funds programs be re-structured to provide for an equal eligibility for Community Choice entitites that seek the conservation and renewables funds to develop large scale urban solar, wind, conservation, and other community based sustainability programs. For example, the Emerging Technologies Fund sets aside 60% of funds for 10kw systems or less. This was written with small consumers in mind - a good idea in the old market - but if whole cities want to build distributed solar (for example) on behalf of all residents and businesses, they need large (300kw and above) installations to achieve the maximum efficiency and payback. In effect this policy accidentally discriminates against Community Choice, which otherwise would raise the scale of nonpolluting power and conservation to a new level, as is being proposed by Supervsor Tom Ammiano in San Francisco.

While the California Energy Crisis is economic in its effects its cause is political, and the continuation of the crisis is also political. The essential political problem in California is that shell-shocked legislators who believed any consumer could find a power supplier a year ago (and ignored aggregation as market interference), now seem to believe that it takes 30 million people to find a power supply contract, and doubt that a mere 450,000 people could find a power provider. Worse, some politicians will do anything to bring short term relief, and appear perfectly willing to sell the farm to pay the bills. We urge you to support measures to limit the duration of the long term contracts being negotiated by the Governor. It is better to pay more now for a short term contract than to lock Californians into (some have said) 20 year contracts that will create future captivity for Californians and their economy.

Rather than commit the whole state to artificially high-priced long term contracts, the Governor and Legislature should look to getting Californians out of the captivity they have been in for three years. Community Choice can deliver non-monopoly power.

Ohio