California Democrats are Building a Giant Political Slush Fund

and no one is noticing, which is exactly the plan

I’m going to show you something complicated and murky — but if you stick with me through a few minutes of slogging, there will be a moment when the lights go on and you see a plan. And what a plan it is.

As very brief background, remember what I just wrote about the California legislator Corey Jackson’s non-profit corporation, which got millions of dollars a year from local governments and foundations — including a $3.9 million “loan” from county government with terms that didn’t require any repayment ever — to provide “youth services.” What kind of youth services did Corey Jackson’s government-funded non-profit corporation provide?

See, they helped at-risk youth by mentoring teenagers to work in a campaign phone bank, calling voters and asking them to support a ballot measure to increase property taxes to provide government with more revenue. Corey Jackson’s non-profit corporation converted public funds into campaign funding. Your taxes paid for political operations.

So.

In 2002, the California legislature passed the Community Choice Aggregation Act, a measure allowing local governments to create new electric power utilities through the use of joint powers agreements. Cities and counties can join together and create new governments, joint powers authorities, to sell electricity. If you click on that last link, you’ll see this extremely important sentence about the legal relationship between community choice aggregators (the new governments that sell electricity) and the investor-owned utilities (IOUs) like PG&E and Southern California Edison: “The IOU continues to provide transmission and distribution, metering, billing, collection, and customer service to retail customers participating in CCAs.” Remember this sentence, because we’ll come back to it in just a moment.

So a community choice aggregator, which is a local government created by local governments, sells electricity, and the local governments that created the community choice aggregator transfer their residential and commercial utility customers to the new community choice aggregator. They vote to say that you, Christopher Thelonious P. Bray at 23 Maple Lane, are now a customer of the new government we created. They’ve done this, so far, to a total of 14 million utility accounts, taking people who were customers of private utility companies and making them customers of new governments. And unless you’re reading the agenda of your city council or your county board of supervisors, or you read all of your junk mail very carefully, you don’t know that this has happened to you.

Then, as your city votes to change your utility account to a different provider, let’s go back a paragraph to see how it works: “The IOU continues to provide transmission and distribution, metering, billing, collection, and customer service to retail customers participating in CCAs.”

See what that means? Your utility account was changed without your permission or your knowledge, you’re now paying a portion of your electric bill to an obscure joint powers authority, and the investor-owned utility that was selling you electricity last week is still the complete public face of the electric power you buy. Your bill still says “Southern California Edison” on it, say for example, and if your power goes out you call Southern California Edison, and the trucks that come out to fix the power lines say “Southern California Edison” on the side.

But you’re no longer a customer of Southern California Edison, which now collects the money that you owe your community choice aggregator — your new local government. The IOU, the private utility company, also charges you for the delivery of that electricity and the maintenance of the power grid, in a separate line item, and a new line item on your bill identifies your power generation charge. But your bill otherwise looks the same.

The effect: people don’t know where their money is going. Government switches your utility account from a private company to a new government, a joint powers authority, but your bill and your maintenance and your customer service all look the same.

From time to time, on social media, people will wonder why their bill from the greedy bastards at PG&E or SCE has become so expensive, and they’ll even complain that the money-grubbing jerks added some fake new charge about power generation:

PG&E is making me pay for some “Ava Community Electric Generation” thing, what a scam! Those jerks at PG&E, my electric power utility.

But Ava Community Energy is a marketing name for a local government, the East Bay Community Energy Authority — a community choice aggregator. This person is no longer a customer of PG&E, and he doesn’t know it. He’s buying electricity from a government.

Think about this: 14 million customers who don’t know where the money goes when they pay their electric bill.

We’re about the get to that moment when I said the light would go on.

I live in the service area of a community choice aggregator called the Clean Power Alliance, which operates in Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Here are the important numbers in their most recent budget:

They have revenues over $1.5 billion, with a b, and an annual surplus — what the private sector would call a profit — in the hundreds of millions. All of that comes from the operations of a new local government that took a stream of revenue from private corporations by voting to transfer their customers. Now look at the lower parts of that same budget page, and note especially the line item at the bottom:

They have hundreds of millions of dollars in cash reserves — that they got from people who are scratching their heads and wondering why the hell the greedy bastards at Southern California Edison are charging them so much money.

But here’s the next important piece:

The Clean Power Alliance, with its hundreds of millions of dollars in reserves, is one of…twenty-five community choice aggregators in California. There are just over two dozen of these new governments, each piling up their own reserves. Fourteen million customers, by the way, is fourteen million households and businesses, so it’s a lot more than fourteen million people.

What do they do with all that money? LOL, ladies and gentlemen, LOL:

They’re working to shape the legislative and regulatory environment, you see. And they’re going to get a lot of help, because there’s a growing movement of non-profit corporations in California that are working hard on climate justice, with some of them approaching climate from the public health space — and with policy support from the state:

Each individual community choice aggregator is beginning to move toward supporting the climate justice and energy equity communities:

The California Public Utilities Commission, working right at the heart of their regulatory mandate, has defined the kind of social justice communities that community choice aggregators can support:

The grants, so far, have not been large. But the available money is growing rapidly, and it’s not just going to sit there. And like Corey Jackson, the agency once known as Marin Clean Energy (before becoming just MCE) is training young people to lead the way:

So:

California has twenty-five new local governments that will take tens of billions of dollars from private utilities every decade, developing billions of dollars in cash reserves while explicitly turning toward energy equity, climate justice, youth training, and re-shaping the legislative and regulatory environment through partnerships with non-profit social justice corporations.

We’re politicizing utility bills, and we’re doing it very, very quietly.