Davis Names Executive to Speed Construction of Power Plants in State

With temperatures rising and electrical supplies strained, Gov. Gray Davis on Tuesday tapped a former Clinton administration official and executives from major construction firms to help speed completion of power plants.

Davis, who predicted that the worst of the energy crisis will abate by the fall, announced that he has retained Richard Sklar, 67, former president of a construction firm, to head a team that will help accelerate the building of power plants.

Speaking to business leaders at a California Chamber of Commerce convention in Sacramento, Davis said Sklar’s job will be “to make sure there are no hurdles [and] to cut red tape.”

“Richard Sklar knows electricity,” Davis said. “He knows how to find megawatts.”

Former President Bill Clinton sent Sklar to the Balkans in 1996 to try to help resolve the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Sklar arrived in Sarajevo to find that power was on for only two hours a day and set about expanding electricity generation.

In an interview, Sklar said his father was a mechanical engineer who designed power stations.

“This power world is my world,” Sklar said, adding that he had an electric car and solar panels in the mid-1970s.

This Feb. 8, Davis announced at a news conference that he was appointing Larry Hamlin, a vice president of Southern California Edison, as his “construction czar.” Hamlin’s job was to speed power plant construction.

Davis spokesman Roger Salazar said that Hamlin’s stint was temporary and that the executive must return to Edison. Sklar’s contract is for a longer period, Salazar said, but it is unclear how long.

Sklar is being retained as a consultant, paid $100,000 initially. Other firms, Salazar said, are loaning employees as volunteers. Joining Sklar will be representatives of the engineering and construction firms Bechtel, URS Corp. Engineering, Fluor Daniel, Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas, and A. Teichert & Sons. At least one Bechtel subsidiary is involved in power plant construction in California.

“There is no conflict of interest,” Sklar said, adding that no one in the group will have authority to decide who gets contracts.

A mechanical engineer, Sklar was president of the San Francisco-based construction management firm O’Brien Kreitzberg Inc. Sklar’s firm also oversaw construction of the Metro Rail Green Line in Los Angeles and the rebuilding of the Los Angeles Central Library.

He was also chairman of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission under then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein. In that role, he oversaw rebuilding of the cable car system, completing the work ahead of schedule--in time for the 1984 Democratic National Convention there. Feinstein’s husband is a major investor in URS, one of the firms that will loan employees to Sklar’s team.

“He’s very competent,” said state Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco) of Sklar, whom he met in 1972. “He’s a very good problem solver and he brooks no nonsense. . . . He’s a renaissance man. He loves music, he loves politics and he’s a gourmet cook.”

Sklar has also displayed a sense of humor, once donating to San Francisco Zoo two capybaras, rodents the size of a hog. He named one Quentin and the other Kopp, after a former San Francisco city supervisor and state senator who is now a Superior Court judge.

“I’m 67; I’ve made all the money I need to make,” said Sklar, who owns a vineyard near the Napa Valley town of Rutherford and has a home in San Francisco.

“My reputation is what’s going to be at stake in this, not the governor’s,” he said. “I have a 40-year history of delivering--and that’s what I’m going to do. I don’t like to lose.”

As Davis announced Sklar’s appointment, one of the governor’s top energy advisors, John Stevens, resigned, effective Friday. The governor praised Stevens as a tireless worker.

Stevens worked on several energy-related tasks, among them Davis’ efforts to keep utilities out of bankruptcy. Davis appointed him for a day in January to the state Public Utilities Commission, on which he cast a key vote to raise rates.

The state’s power grid operators declared a Stage 2 emergency Tuesday afternoon, as temperatures hit 90 degrees in downtown Los Angeles and two major power plants in Southern California unexpectedly shut down. Power reserves dropped to nearly 5%, below the minimum 7% that the California Independent System Operator seeks to maintain.

Tuesday’s emergency is not a predictor of worse electricity troubles to come, said Cal-ISO’s Stephanie McCorkle, because an unusually high number of power plants are down for repairs that were planned months ago.

The plants not running Tuesday would be capable of supplying 10,000 megawatts, she said, or about a third of Tuesday’s peak demand. By mid-June, no power plants should be shut off for scheduled maintenance, McCorkle said.

The state will lose more than 1,000 megawatts of production starting this weekend when a unit of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant near San Luis Obispo is shut down for refueling. The shutdown, planned a year ago, will last 35 days, according to Pacific Gas & Electric.

In his remarks Tuesday, Davis said his goal is to boost the state’s energy supply to exceed demand 15% by 2003.

“This is probably the most complicated challenge the state has faced in 50 years,” Davis said. “But we are providing steady and reliable leadership, and I believe this thing will be behind us by the end of fall.”

* Times staff writers Nancy Vogel and Jenifer Warren contributed to this story.