Harris’s Inaction Against Utilities Helped Fuel Wildfires

Consumer groups for years have criticized former California Gov. Jerry Brown and his appointees for failing to adequately regulate the public utilities to prevent the downed power wires and exploding transformers from igniting the blazes. PG&E and other utilities are notorious for spreading political donations around the state and cutting checks for millions in lobbying and public relations even while going through bankruptcy.

For several years when Brown was in office, his sister Kathleen sat on the board of directors of Sempra, the parent company of Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric. She made more than $1 million in cash and stock. Brown kept Michael Peevey, a former Southern California Edison executive and longtime family friend, as the head of the Public Utilities Commission (PUC), the agency charged with regulating it and other utilities. Peevey, whose wife Carol Liu was a Democratic state senator at the time, was eventually forced out in 2014 after a scandal involving inappropriate communications with PG&E while soliciting $1 million in political donations from the utility. Peevey retired amid the controversy.

State AG “AWOL,” Argues One Consumer Advocate

Although Jerry Brown is out of office, critics say another prominent California Democrat bears part of the blame – and if the polls are accurate, she’s next in line to become vice president of the United States.

Consumer groups for years have faulted Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s 2020 running mate, for failing to prosecute the state’s biggest utilities and the Public Utility Commission officials who the groups say let the companies skate for years.

“She was absent, she was AWOL, she didn’t file any charges whatsoever,” Jamie Court told RealClearPolitics.

Court is the president of Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit progressive organization that advocates for consumer and taxpayer interests with offices in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

“She was the first line, and she should have stepped in, and she didn’t because of political concerns,” he charged.

While Harris was still attorney general (she left in 2017 after winning a U.S. Senate seat), Consumer Watchdog was so incensed about Harris’s decision not to prosecute two high-profile utility cases that it issued a one-page paper on what it deemed “public utility corruption and Kamala Harris’s failure to act for the public.”

Harris’s campaign declined to respond to the criticism when contacted by RCP. But Court, who nonetheless supports the Biden-Harris ticket because the idea of Trump in office for another four years is “unthinkable” for him, is hardly alone in the criticism. Several California newspapers and other media outlets have raised similar complaints while Harris remained attorney general and even in the years afterward.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/10/05/critics_harriss_inaction_against_utilities_helped_fuel_wildfires_144359.html

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The issue surfaced during Harris’s Senate run in 2016, though it didn’t prove a major problem for her in defeating former Rep. Loretta Sanchez in the Democratic primary and sailing to victory. It popped up again in early 2018 when the San Jose Mercury News ran an editorial board piece pressing current Attorney General Xavier Becerra to pursue the case against Peevey and asking whether it had been “swept under the rug.”

“It would be a travesty if current Attorney General Xavier Becerra let the statute of limitations run out and did not both complete the investigation and announce the result,” the paper argued.

A Becerra spokesman in 2018 told the paper that the attorney general couldn’t comment because the investigation, which began in 2015, was ongoing.

There are actually two investigations Court and other critics cite when they take aim at Harris for failing to prosecute the PUC and PG&E. The first involves a 2010 gas line explosion in the city of San Bruno, south of San Francisco, that killed eight people, injured 66 and destroyed 38 homes. Harris opened a criminal probe into the explosion but never prosecuted the case.

The U.S. attorney’s office eventually took it up and brought criminal charges. In 2016 a federal jury found PG&E guilty of six felony charges – five counts of violating pipeline safety standards and one count of obstructing the investigation into the San Bruno explosion. That investigation turned up evidence that Peevey was so aligned with PG&E he allegedly helped his former employer go judge-shopping for someone who would be sympathetic to the utility in deciding the $1.3-billion penalty phase.

In explaining her decision not to prosecute the San Bruno case, Harris said at the time that her office had become part of a joint task force with federal investigators. Court counters that it was state Democratic politics and a major conflict of interest within Brown’s administration that kept her from pursuing the case.

“Clearly there were prosecutable issues with Mike Peevey and San Onofre, and PG&E, and she let it all go…and it was not good for the public interest,” Court argues. “It’s all public record, and it was all documented. It’s about the political class and not wanting to make trouble for the other members of the class, and I find that appalling when the crimes rise to the level of the facts that we saw.”

The alleged judge-shoppingled the San Jose Mercury News to opine that “Peevey’s relationship with PG&E should have gotten him fired in the wake of the 2010 San Bruno explosion. But Gov. Brown inexplicably kept him on the job.”

Even after the scrutiny, Brown continued to protect the PUC from bills that tried to push it to act more aggressively. In 2016, he vetoed several fire-prevention measures, arguing that the state PUC and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection had a perfectly good process in place. One bill passed in 2016 would have required the PUC to identify and map high-risk wildfire hotspots due to overhead utility lines, taking into consideration local governments’ concerns so that utilities would have to step up their mitigation efforts in those areas. The PUC took nine years to create a map of the most fire-prone areas, and Brown vetoed a bill, passed unanimously in the legislature, aimed at getting the agency off the dime.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/10/05/critics_harriss_inaction_against_utilities_helped_fuel_wildfires_144359.html

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