{"id":1437,"date":"2010-02-22T18:35:04","date_gmt":"2010-02-22T23:35:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.noiselabs.com\/blog\/?p=1437"},"modified":"2010-02-22T18:36:42","modified_gmt":"2010-02-22T23:36:42","slug":"public-utility-chutzpah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.noiselabs.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/22\/public-utility-chutzpah\/","title":{"rendered":"Public Utility Chutzpah"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"PG&E<\/dt>\n
PG&E Building in San Francisco<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

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Today, I noticed an ad for California Prop 16, with the catchline “Preserve Your Right To<\/span> Vote.” Thinking that this sounded like a lot of spin, I decided to look it up.<\/p>\n

According to Ballotpedia<\/a>, this is basically an initiative funded by PG&E to make it more difficult for municipalities to start their own utilities.\u00a0 It would amend the California state constitution to require that any Community Choice Aggregator be approved by a 2\/3 vote.<\/p>\n

Now, I already thought that California’s system for amending the constitution by a simple majority is ridiculous, but this really takes the cake.\u00a0 (Perhaps even the lemon olive oil cake.\u00a0 See below.)<\/p>\n

Let me get this straight — you’re using a simple 50% vote to require that, in the future, individual communities need a 2\/3 majority to do something?\u00a0 That seems really backward.<\/p>\n

But what really gets me is that PG&E, a monopoly public utility, is planning on spending $25-35 million dollars to singlehandedly fund the campaign for this initiative — that’s money that we’re paying them!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PG&E Building in San Francisco Today, I noticed an ad for California Prop 16, with the catchline “Preserve Your Right To Vote.” Thinking that this sounded like a lot of spin, I decided to look it up. According to Ballotpedia, this is basically an initiative funded by PG&E to make it more difficult for municipalities […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[34,199,100,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.noiselabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1437"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.noiselabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.noiselabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.noiselabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.noiselabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1437"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.noiselabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1440,"href":"http:\/\/www.noiselabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1437\/revisions\/1440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.noiselabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.noiselabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.noiselabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}