Utility Merger Backers Accuse Council of Bias

The San Diego City Council compromised its neutrality in regard to the merger of San Diego Gas & Electric Co. and Southern California Edison when it passed a Jan. 17 ordinance committing the city “to opposing (the merger) with all vigor and legal recourse,” a pro-merger organization claimed Wednesday.

San Diegans for the Merger, organized by an energy consultant who lists Edison as one of his clients, believes that public hearings such as the one being held tonight are a sham, and questions whether the council can justly hold hearings on the transfer of SDG&E;’s utility franchise, said spokesman Larry O’Donnell.

O’Donnell’s statements came as San Diegans for the Merger broadened its lawsuit against the city for allegedly violating the state’s open-meetings law, accusing the council of a string of illegal closed-door budget decisions to pay for attorneys and consultants to thwart the merger. The organization contends that those expenditures, decided over the past year, should have been debated in public.

“My main concern is that the city . . . tried to have it both ways,” said O’Donnell, whose firm, Senior Policy Associates, is being paid an unspecified sum by Edison for public-relations work. The council “has tried to be a partisan, stiff opponent of the merger, pulling out every stop it can in secret, while publicly affirming that they haven’t reached a decision,” he said.

A Superior Court judge refused Oct. 12 to grant the organization a temporary restraining order barring the city from spending $1.5 million allocated for attorneys and consultants in an Aug. 8 private session. San Diegans for the Merger, which is seeking a preliminary injunction for the same purpose, Wednesday filed amended legal papers alleging many such illegal meetings.

City attorneys have maintained that the private sessions are legal under exceptions to the Brown Act allowing the council to hold private strategy sessions on “pending litigation,” which includes the city’s participating in proceedings before the Public Utilities Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Michael Shames, executive director of the Utility Consumers Action Network and a foe of the merger, agrees that the city should not reveal through public deliberations how it is allocating its expenditures for legal help. To do so would give the utilities a strategic advantage, he said.

Assistant City Atty. Ron Johnson said Wednesday that the Jan. 17 ordinance expressed the council’s opposition in the absence of information on how the merger would affect San Diego’s economy, employment picture and environment.

“Without those things being considered, it is necessary that we be opposed to the merger until those things are taken into account,” Johnson said of the ordinance, which allocated $126,625 to hire staff in City Atty. John Witt’s office. However, he conceded that “it doesn’t say it nearly as clearly as it should.”

Paul Downey, spokesman for Mayor Maureen O’Connor, said that “the mayor’s position is that she is extremely concerned about it and, so far, the evidence is fairly compelling that there could be some fairly serious impacts on the citizens of this region.” He said, however, that O’Connor’s stance would not prevent her from keeping an open mind in the upcoming franchise hearings.