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INDUSTRY-BY-INDUSTRY OUTLOOK : The Year in Preview

By CHRIS KRAUL
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California came several years late to the nation’s economic recovery party, but the state should be celebrating all through 1997.

Here is what key industries will be up to:

UTILITIES: With the start of electric power deregulation looming, residential and business customers will be besieged with incentives from power marketers to abandon their mother utilities. But apart from a state-mandated 10% rate cut going into effect January 1998, residential customers will see little price relief because so much of their bills remain dedicated to paying off nuclear plants and alternative energy contracts. The L.A. Department of Water and Power may even raise residential electricity rates and cut rates to businesses to keep commercial customers from fleeing to marketers. Southern California Edison will fight tooth and nail against the Southern California Gas-San Diego Gas & Electric merger that may come to a Public Utilities Commission vote in late 1997.

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Chris Kraul

Chris Kraul covered South America for the Los Angeles Times from his base in Bogota, Colombia. He joined the paper in 1987 and was business editor of the San Diego edition until it closed in 1992. He then began covering the border and Mexican economies until his assignment to The Times’ Mexico City bureau in 2001. He reopened the paper’s Bogota bureau in 2006. He has also covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is a graduate of the University of South Florida and also has been a reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, San Diego Union-Tribune and the San Diego Business Journal.

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