Mayoral Candidates Find Common Ground on Power

As California’s energy crisis roils the waters in Sacramento and Washington, Los Angeles’ political scene has remained an island of calm.

Even the six major candidates vying to become the next mayor of the nation’s second-largest city have barely mentioned the electricity deregulation fiasco that is on the lips of every other politico and pundit in the state.

That’s because residents of Los Angeles are protected from the threat of rate hikes and rolling blackouts by their municipal utility, the Department of Water and Power. Municipal utilities--which also serve Riverside, Pasadena, Glendale and Sacramento--were not deregulated by the landmark 1996 bill, which was signed by then-Gov. Pete Wilson.

But that does not mean the energy crisis will not affect Los Angeles. Indeed, the next mayor will have to decide a number of issues that affect, not only the energy bills of city residents, but those of all Californians.

“We’re not an island in the middle of this stormy sea,” said Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles), one of the candidates for mayor. “We’ve got too much intertwined with what goes on outside the city limits to believe that we’re not going to be affected because we’ve got our energy.”

There are few disagreements among the major mayoral contenders on what they would do in response to the crisis. Electrical policy is a dauntingly complex field that politicians are loath to venture into. In speeches, interviews and the regular mayoral forums that occur almost daily, the leading candidates for mayor sound happy to defer to the current director of DWP, S. David Freeman, who has won widespread praise for streamlining the agency and arguing against deregulating it. Freeman is on a leave of absence to negotiate power contracts for the state.

Still, the approaches mapped out by the major contenders subtly illustrate some of their differences.

Becerra speaks of federal remedies before proposing citywide conservation programs. State Controller Kathleen Connell talks in financial terms and cites legislation in Sacramento, while City Councilman Joel Wachs and, to a lesser extent, City Atty. James K. Hahn are eager to rattle off their histories of working with the DWP.

Commercial real estate broker Steve Soboroff praises his most significant endorser, Mayor Richard Riordan, for picking Freeman to run the DWP. Former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, the only one of the six leading candidates who was in the Legislature when it unanimously voted for deregulation of electricity, stresses his role in exempting Los Angeles from the program.

Most candidates agree with the city’s strategy in using Los Angeles’ stable energy source as an enticement for businesses to relocate.

But the consensus breaks down over a more divisive question: Should the city sell its surplus energy to cash-strapped utilities for use elsewhere in the state without assurances it will be repaid.

That issue not only divides the candidates, it has split the city leadership.

Riordan, a businessman who favors ensuring repayment, disagrees with his appointee, Freeman, a longtime advocate of public power who says the city should help the state through difficult times without an ironclad payment plan.

As he does on many issues, Soboroff sides with the mayor, saying energy “should be provided COD.” Controller Connell says she helped introduce a bill in the Legislature that would place liens on utility assets to secure repayment, even if cash is not available. Wachs, too, says he is concerned about repayment.

Those three candidates generally position themselves as the fiercest critics of city government and the status quo, and in this case, their counterparts strike a softer tone.

The other three major candidates say that repayment is less of a worry, especially since Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill this month placing the state’s credit behind all future utility power purchases.

The candidates, to varying degrees, embrace most other aspects of the DWP’s agenda. Among the most controversial is a plan, drafted by the City Council, for the DWP to enter the natural gas exploration business. The price of gas, which fires many power plants, has risen exponentially during recent months, driving up electricity prices.

“If we can keep a guaranteed supply of clean fuel for our customers it has fulfilled our mission in a phenomenal way,” said Wachs, an early proponent of having the DWP scout for new sources of natural gas.

Other candidates support that notion.

“Obviously, I’m not enthusiastic about DWP becoming some wildcatter out there, but I think the proposal by Mr. Freeman is prudent,” Hahn said.

Villaraigosa agreed. “We’ve got to make sure we have an appropriate source for natural gas that doesn’t put us at the whim of the market,” Villaraigosa said.

But scouting for gas can be a risky business--thousands of dollars spent exploring can mean nothing if drills come up empty. Becerra and Soboroff both have balked at the proposal, saying it needs more research. “Going into gas exploration takes you into a whole new realm,” Becerra cautioned.

All of the major candidates stress the need for conservation. Becerra recommends using money that DWP gets for selling its power to provide conservation incentives to businesses and residents. “The more we start talking conservation, conservation, the more energy we’re going to have,” he said.

Though most candidates say they hope to boost conservation, Becerra is the only one to propose diverting the DWP’s surplus revenues to that end. The rest of the leading candidates say money should continue to be dedicated toward paying down DWP’s billion-dollar debt, which was incurred building the power plants that provide electricity to the city.

“I really would like us to focus on paying off that debt,” Connell said. “If they did that, it would enable us to free up the dollars” to build new plants.

Of the top candidates, Villaraigosa is the most outspoken on the issue of expanding DWP’s use of environmentally friendly power generation, such as solar and wind technology--a subject also touched upon by Hahn. Villaraigosa cites Freeman’s recommendations for exploring those methods and his warnings that the city will run out of generating capacity by 2010.

“These are things he was talking about last year, and frankly there was no leadership in the city and very little support,” Villaraigosa said. “It’s an opportunity for us to learn to avoid being in this situation in the year 2010.”

Soboroff emphasized the need to retrofit the DWP’s current power stations to make them more efficient. And Wachs, citing his efforts in the 1970s to make DWP slimmer and promote energy savings, has revived a conservation program from that decade calling for the city to advise businesses and residences on how to save energy.

Still, in a campaign that often features the leading candidates vying to most fiercely criticize City Hall, it’s difficult to find much to attack when it comes to energy.

Said Wachs: “I think this is something we in the city can take credit for having done right.”

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Times staff writer Beth Shuster contributed to this story.