SDG&E; Survey Leaves Laguna Leaders Asking Questions

Fred Lang was sitting at home minding his own business when the pollster called, saying he was doing a little research for San Diego Gas & Electric Co.

There were some general questions about Lang’s appliances, his thoughts about the power company and his opinion of its service.

“The usual stuff,” recalled Lang, a landscape architect and environmental activist in South Laguna Beach. “Nothing really exciting.”

And then, without explanation, the pollster began asking Lang what he thought about certain community leaders, including all five members of the Laguna Beach City Council and Lang’s son-in-law, Tom Flattery.

“They were asking about different people. ‘Do you know them? Do you approve of them?’ ” Lang said.

“And then he asked me what I knew about Fred Lang, and I told him, ‘Why, I’m Fred Lang.’ So he goes on to some other people and then asks me again about Fred Lang. I said, ‘I told you, I’m Fred Lang!’ I don’t think he was listening the first time.”

What Lang unwittingly stumbled across was what an SDG & E spokesman called a “routine” and innocent sampling of opinion by the utility’s in-house research department.

Dick Manning, vice president of public relations, said people were asked about City Council members and others in an attempt to identify community leaders.

“Nothing insidious about it,” Manning said.

But over at City Hall, people were looking at it differently. There are plenty of questions, said City Manager Kenneth Frank, about why SDG & E was so interested in identifying community leaders and whether the whole thing was legal.

The survey, Frank noted, came as SDG & E and Southern California Edison Co. are fighting over about 2,000 customers in South Laguna.

SDG & E has served the area for more than 70 years and wants to continue doing so. But armed with statistics that show SDG & E’s rates are higher than Edison’s, some residents want to change power companies now that South Laguna has been annexed by Laguna Beach, which is served by Edison.

At its April 19 meeting, Laguna’s City Council will consider asking the California Public Utilities Commission to change carriers.

Some council members say the survey was clearly part of SDG & E’s strong lobbying effort to retain its customers in South Laguna, and as such was a political exercise that should have been paid for by stockholders and not the ratepayers.

At the city’s request, the PUC has begun an investigation to determine if the utility violated rules prohibiting utilities from using ratepayers’ dollars to fund political surveys.

“No. 1, I think that there is a question as to whether SDG & E is involved somehow in the political process in the areas in which it operates, and No. 2, if this is something that the ratepayers are paying for. If they are, it isn’t right,” Frank said.

In a letter to the PUC, Frank said, “We would have preferred to send you a copy of the questionnaire for your review, but while the SDG & E staff has allowed us to look at a copy of the survey, they would not give us a copy for our record.”

SDG & E’s Manning denied any impropriety in the survey. He refused to reveal the contents of the questionnaire, or the results, because they were confidential.

“We are in the field with a survey almost all the time,” he said. “We survey on a variety of subjects . . . on appliance use, on customer attitudes, on perceptions of bills, on things we are thinking about doing in customer service.

“This was not a political survey,” he continued. “We’re not trying to do something political. The reason we might have asked the question about community leaders would be to see if people identify them as community leaders. The way those names would come up is not for political purposes.”

Manning conceded that the utility’s customers paid for the February survey, but said it only cost $800, because staff members of SDG & E’s own research department conducted it. They called 700 homes, 200 to 300 of them in South Laguna.

Only by identifying community leaders, Manning said, could the utility know who best to speak with about the company’s concerns and desires.

At Least 9 Names

Manning declined to say how many names were mentioned in the survey, but Lang said he remembered at least nine: the five council members, his own and South Laguna civic leaders Flattery, Anne Christoff and Rich Jeffries.

“It makes me very suspicious,” said Mayor Neil Fitzpatrick. “I don’t understand exactly what they want to do with the information they are collecting on us. I just haven’t been able to conjure up a legitimate purpose for this whole thing. They seem to have shot themselves in the foot with this one.”

Councilman Dan Kenney said he was angry at first but later tried to put it in the context of the battle between the two utilities for the slice of Laguna Beach.

“I don’t know, time heals all wounds,” he said. “We’ve got this junior guerrilla war going on in the streets of South Laguna over which utility will serve them, and I guess they (SDG & E) want to know what the public thinks so they can be a friend to anyone.”

But he said that “it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for a public utility to go around asking people what they think of city councilmen. You and I end up paying for all this, and yet they are doing something that they don’t want to tell us about.”

PUC investigator Leo Lee in San Francisco said he will try to get a copy of the questionnaire to determine if the survey was properly funded.

“If it was something involving services, questions over if the customers liked the service or didn’t or if improvements could be made, then that is proper,” Lee said. “But if they asked political questions, then that was not proper.”

Lee said SDG & E has until Monday to answer his questions.

Jeffries, president of the South Laguna Civic Assn., said he is more curious than mad.

“I am curious as to why they are doing it and what their purpose is,” he said. “You kind of wonder what is behind it all.”