MANTECA, Calif. — At the Manteca City Council’s regular meeting Tuesday night, council members discussed two things PG&E-related.
They heard from PG&E on the electric utility’s Public Safety Power Shutoff program, a newly expanded plan to shut power off to a wide swath of regional communities during hot, dry and windy weather conditions favorable to wildfires. PG&E’s equipment has been blamed for causing the Camp Fire, California’s deadliest wildfire in history.
Manteca isn’t in a place of immediate fire danger, but people there and in neighboring communities including Ripon and Escalon could lose power for days since PG&E’s power shutoff plan involves cutting power to the larger transmission lines that provide electricity to whole regions. Last year’s plan involved only de-energizing the smaller distribution lines, so fewer people were impacted by each shutoff.
City leaders have scrambled to put together a plan to deal with a days-long power shutoff during hot summer months.
“Citizens with critical medical or health issues will be directed to a designated shelter site,” a presentation for Tuesday’s meeting said. “The Manteca Senior Center will be opened as an emergency shelter for citizens with medical or health issues.”
It says the city is exploring private contracts for generators and diesel delivery to help keep city facilities up-and-running during long shutoffs. After 24 hours without power, according to the plan, the city will consider a “Proclamation of Local Emergency” and hold daily media conferences, possibly impose curfews and request mutual aid from unaffected areas.
That leads to the other item Manteca City Council members discussed Tuesday: removing themselves from PG&E’s power grid.
Council members voted unanimously to approve Mayor Benjamin Cantu signing a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom from himself and the mayors of Escalon and Ripon. A draft of the letter shows the mayors are considering asking Newsom to get involved in an “ongoing, decades-long municipalization effort that we believe offers a partial solution to the situation that California is now grappling with in the wake of Pacific Gas & Electric’s (PG&E) wildfire liabilities, felony convictions, and now bankruptcy.”
Since 2004, the letter says, the South San Joaquin Irrigation District (SSJID) has been fighting to offer retail electric service to people in Manteca, Ripon and Escalon.
Leaders in those communities want SSJID to replace PG&E as the local electric utility, saying it would offer “a transparent, responsive, safe, economical, and locally accountable utility that understands the needs and values of our communities,” the draft letter says.
It further claims that PG&E has resisted this effort from the beginning by “engaging in disruptive public relations campaigns, propping up a local citizen resistance groups, and by injecting opposition into local approval processes for SSJID to exercise its latent power granted under the California Water Code to provide retail electric service to our region.”
The region has been dissatisfied with PG&E’s “substandard service” for a long time, the letter says. It cites recent examples beyond just the potential shutoffs this summer. People have been frustrated with “an unexpected, year-long, public road closure due to delays in PG&E’s ability to complete the relocation of a gas main in the City of Manteca,” as well as delays in energizing street lights in new home subdivisions and delays in providing power to the construction site of a “new, large-scale resort employer committed to the Central Valley.”
Read that draft letter HERE.
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