Power-Sharing Fuels Resentment in the Northwest

It’s not that they don’t like California up in the Pacific Northwest--not at all.

But when Oregon state Sen. John Lim introduced a bill in 1999 to erect signs on the border saying, “You are welcome to visit Oregon, but please don’t stay,” he got congratulations on the measure from all over the state. (The applause didn’t translate into votes; the wording was quickly changed to “Keep Oregon Green” when it was pointed out that Lim himself had moved to Oregon from Korea.)

When Janet Wing and her husband moved up to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, several years ago from San Diego, they lasted exactly 14 months. Then Wing put a moving sale ad in the paper. “California haters, put up or shut up,” it said. “Your dollar spent here will help two Southern Californians go back to the Golden State. If you can’t come to the sale, send money.”

The garage sale sold out on the first day, and Wing got a $5 bill in the mail signed by five Idahoans. “We can’t come to your sale, but please leave town anyway,” a note said.

So it perhaps comes as no surprise that when the Bonneville Power Administration on a single day last week shipped California enough Northwest electricity to power the city of Portland, they weren’t exactly doing handsprings in Puget Sound.

In states like Washington, Oregon and Idaho, a profound distrust and distaste for all things Californian is as abiding as the rain. The wave of resentment that has accompanied U.S. Energy Department orders to sell Northwest power to California--when the Northwest is facing its own energy shortage and sharp electricity rate hikes--comes from a long-standing conviction that California has grabbed more than its share of the dwindling resources of the West.

“We have our governor, Gary Locke, in Washington asking people to turn their thermostats down and cut everything back. And there’s this feeling that whatever we save is going to be shipped out to Southern California so you guys can keep the blender cranking out the frozen daiquiris,” said Kirkland, Wash.-based novelist Robert Ferrigno, himself a transplant since 1991 from Long Beach.

Sensing a rising note of generalized pique, the governors of Washington and Oregon met in Sacramento last week with Gov. Gray Davis and urged California to adopt stronger conservation measures.

“It’s very important that this doesn’t deteriorate into a Northwest vs. California,” Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber said before the meeting. “We’re all in this together. We cannot afford to let California go down the tubes.”

Much as we would like to, seemed to be the unspoken end of that sentence, in a region that for years has affixed blame for traffic congestion, high housing prices, smog and gangs on a flood of migration from its neighbor to the south.

Wing wasn’t just looking for garage sale customers when she posted the ad in Coeur d’Alene; she and her husband got their welcome to Idaho the day they moved in, when someone wrote “Californians Go Home” in the dust on their moving truck.

“Virtually every day we were there, there were letters to the editor complaining about Californians, how they were trashing the environment,” Wing recalls. “Now, these were the people who let the silver mines deforest miles and miles of mountains, and all of their lakes were contaminated with mining pollution, and yet it was the Californians who were trashing their pristine environment,” Wing said.

California resentment seemed to reach its zenith in Seattle in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when newspaper columnist Emmett Watson promoted his “Lesser Seattle” movement, the aim of which was to play down the charms of the Emerald City so that outsiders (read: Southern Californians) wouldn’t want to move there.

“Way back in the early ‘80s this power thing came up. It had to do with selling electricity to California. I wrote a tongue-in-cheek column telling California to keep their damn hands off our power. It said if San Francisco is allegedly the city that knows how, they ought to know how to turn off the lights,” Watson recalls.

University of Washington history professor John Findlay always begins his Northwest history classes asking Washington students to come up with a list of adjectives that come to mind when he mentions California.

“It’s usually the same: fast-paced, crime, cold, insensitive, that kind of stuff,” Findlay said. “Although Southern California in particular has a few special epithets that always come up.”

Findlay believes it is a cultural bias that dates back to the years after the California Gold Rush, when the Pacific Northwest took second seat in competing for economic development, population growth and railroad service. “There was this constant sense that the state was being dominated by California, especially in an economic sense,” he said.

The development of the massive hydropower dams that now supply the electricity being sent to California gave the region an economic edge but set the stage for conflict when drought-prone California began talking of tapping into Columbia River water supplies--an idea that inspired such profound resentment that it has never really gone away--even as Seattle and Portland have bloomed into successful high-tech economic centers in their own right.

In the mind of Ferrigno, who writes Southern California-based novels like “Heartbreaker” from his redoubt near Seattle, the Pacific Northwest has actually come full circle.

“What people here resented about Californians was the sort of louder, faster, flashier lifestyle. Old money in Seattle was still wearing down parkas and plaid wool vests, whereas the new money from California was definitely into Ferraris,” Ferrigno said. “Now, because of Microsoft and the high-tech environment, here there’s this huge money. . . . What’s happened is basically California has won,” Ferrigno said. “The Seattle area now is like a little, high-tech Southern California. There’s lots of flash cars, there’s high-rise buildings, the whole Northwest way of life is over. And now there’s a new hatred for California, which is based on the power situation.

“I’ve seen people interviewed on TV who are normally like the calm voices of reason, can’t-we-get-along kind of people. This one little old lady was saying, ‘All these people are taking our power to run their air conditioners, why don’t they get a fan?’ ”

The situation was hardly relieved when California Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, along with Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), asked the Energy Department in October to review the Bonneville Power Administration’s low-cost electricity contracts provided to major industrial users in the Northwest at rates well below what California often pays.

“A tenfold difference in the price of electricity between the Northwest and California may have had some rationale decades ago when the rate policies were established, but it is archaic and unfair in the increasingly deregulated, market-driven economy of the 21st century,” the three legislators wrote.

The Northwest congressional delegation, incensed, saw it as nothing less than California preparing to move in on the BPA, the agency that has helped guarantee Northwest residents some of the lowest power rates in the nation.

“We are not responsible for the failure of California’s electricity restructuring plan, though the volatility in the California market is pushing prices up in the Northwest and hurting Northwest businesses and consumers,” said a reply signed by U.S. senators of both parties from Washington, Montana, Idaho and Oregon.

Sarah Berk, an aide to U.S. Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho), said Northwestern leaders want to know that California has done everything possible to take care of its own power needs before it comes calling for outside supplies at a time of year when California is traditionally paying back power to the Northwest.

“California has somewhat saddled itself with its own environmental regulations. They have access to energy resources that they have not been able to tap because of their own regulations, so now in the Northwest, we’re saying, ‘Hey, wait a second, this could have been prevented, and our consumers and farmers wouldn’t have to pay the price,’ ” Berk said.

Privately, Northwesterners fear they may be powerless to block a political assault from California against cheap Northwest power supplies. Veteran U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton’s recent election loss in Washington state, combined with the departures of veteran Oregon senators Mark Hatfield and Bob Packwood in recent years, has left many Northwest officials feeling politically vulnerable.

So it is that many political leaders have adopted a go-along-to-get-along approach.

When Kitzhaber and Washington Gov. Gary Locke met Friday with Davis, they combined it with an announcement calling for residents of their states to voluntarily conserve 10% of their energy usage.

What they heard back was that California is conserving too: Overall usage may be down from 10% to 20% because the region has been under long-term power alerts, though Davis has urged Californians to voluntarily cut power use by 7%.

“We needed to hear from Gov. Davis what their plans are in terms of conservation, in terms of legislation, what are you guys doing? And we got solid answers,” Locke spokeswoman Dana Middleton said after the meeting. “We have a much more positive, reassured sense that California is taking action on this than we had before.”