Panel Rejects Bill to Let DWP Sell to Agencies

A Senate committee rejected a bill Tuesday that would enable major governmental customers of Southern California Edison to buy presumably cheaper electricity from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

The bill, which earlier sailed through the Assembly with only one dissenting vote, ran into unexpectedly heavy opposition in the Senate Energy Committee.

At one point, Sen. Debra Bowen (D-Marina del Rey), committee chairwoman, angrily accused representatives of Los Angeles schools and other governmental entities of selfishly seeking to carve a special deal for themselves during the California energy emergency at the expense of ratepayers.

“There are five life rafts and 20 people,” Bowen told the officials, including Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. “You want to say to them, ‘We get on the life rafts.’ ”

The bill, AB 54x, would allow five governmental agencies in Los Angeles County to buy electricity directly from the DWP at rates presumed to be lower than those charged by the debt-ridden Southern California Edison Co.

The bill would apply to power purchases by Los Angeles County, Los Angeles Unified School District, Los Angeles County Office of Education, Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Los Angeles Community College District. Each is served by Edison.

The bill would change a state law that generally restricts municipal utilities, such as the DWP, from signing up customers served by a private utility, such as Edison.

The bill, by Assemblyman Roderick Wright (D-Los Angeles), would authorize the DWP to sell 125 megawatts of electricity to the local agencies, power that now is available for purchase by the state Department of Water Resources on behalf of Edison and bankrupt Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

But Bowen asserted that if the DWP power was unavailable for use by other Californians, the state would have to turn to more expensive sources to offset the loss. This would drive up electricity costs for consumers statewide, she said.

“For you to sit here and tell me you have power that you will make accessible to some people, but not to the benefit of all the citizens of the state, makes me very angry,” Bowen told a DWP representative.

Yaroslavsky said the proposal made common sense because the county next fiscal year faces an increase of about $140 million in extra energy costs, of which $25 million will be in electricity.

He said that if the county could cut its electricity costs by the same amount, the public health department could more easily finance the costs of immunizing children, a state mandate.

“To us, a dollar we spend on electricity costs is a dollar we don’t spend on immunization,” he told Bowen.