Agencies 2, Legislature 0

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With help from Blanca Begert and Ariel Gans

NOT IN MY HOUSE: Californians are mad as hell about their utility bills, and lawmakers know it.

But their efforts to micromanage state agencies’ handling of water and electricity rates are falling flat.

Lawmakers came in hot this session after hearing from constituents about Pacific Gas and Electric rate hikes that the California Public Utilities Commission approved late last year. About 20 legislators signed on to Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin’s AB 1999, which would halt a CPUC proceeding to restructure electric bills around a fixed monthly fee.

Constituents flooded the phones in support — Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas’ office even recorded a new greeting on its public line earlier today directing the bill’s backers to press 1, according to Jennifer Tanner, founder of Indivisible California Green Team, a climate advocacy group that has urged people to call in.

But Rivas resisted the pressure and kept the bill from being heard today, dooming it ahead of Friday’s deadline for bills to clear policy committees in their house of origin. A spokesperson said Rivas believes the CPUC’s proposal to add $24 to most customers’ bills — unveiled in March, after Irwin’s bill — will save customers money, not cost them more.

“The Speaker appreciates his colleague’s legislative scrutiny of the PUC and the governor’s plan, and as a result believes it is no longer necessary to move AB 1999 forward in its current form,” his spokesperson Cynthia Moreno said in an email. “Conversations with the author continue regarding amendments, including assurances that any changes in the fixed charge are revenue neutral for utilities and not a means to increase their profits.”

Lawmakers were also thwarted yesterday in trying to weaken the State Water Resources Control Board’s water-saving targets for urban water agencies. Sen. Angelique Ashby’s SB 1110 would have let agencies demonstrate better water supply management as a way to meet the targets. She narrowed it to just delay the targets by two years.

“We can only be as brave for our constituents as the system allows us to be,” the Sacramento-area Democrat said at Tuesday’s Senate Natural Resources and Water Committee hearing.

The salvos against state agencies are especially striking given that it was lawmakers who originally tasked the agencies with tightening water conservation and restructuring electricity bills, both moves that would increase bills in some cases.

On one level, the tension between lawmakers and the executive branch — an eternal theme in Sacramento’s single-party policymaking apparatus — is about where authority should lie.

“The CPUC needs direction,” Assemblymember Tasha Boerner said during a discussion on electric rates at today’s Utilities and Energy Committee meeting. “If we don’t give them direction, they’re not going to do what they should be doing for our ratepayers.”

On another, it’s about political liability. Elected officials are more vulnerable to political winds than appointed regulators — and more likely to get cold feet when the consequences hit.

“I believe legislators have their ear closer to the ground and are more able to determine what the public and the ratepayers are seeing and experiencing and their direction,” said former state Sen. Jerry Hill, who called for the CPUC president’s resignation in the wake of PG&E’s 2010 gas pipeline explosion that killed eight in San Bruno.

Some lawmakers with feet in both the regulatory and legislative worlds want to go easier on the agencies.

“In some cases, legislators want to re-litigate the underlying legislation,” said Sen. John Laird, who served as Natural Resources Secretary under former Gov. Jerry Brown, in an interview. “It always needs to be given a chance to work and to run its process. You can’t do oversight for something that isn’t final or a program that hasn’t even started.”

You can expect more legislative intervention: Sen. Josh Becker’s SB 1374, which targets a recent CPUC decision limiting solar incentives for schools, apartments and farms, cleared policy committees this week following a vigorous discussion over ratepayer impacts. — WV, CvK

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IN THE EVENT OF A FIRE…: Legislators on a key committee appeared split today on whether to force California’s property insurance market to adapt to climate change as it starts crumbling under huge wildfire losses — or just to try and fix it first.

Becker argued the former. His SB 1060 would require insurance companies take community efforts to lower wildfire risk more into account in their underwriting models. It’s only fair and sensible, he said, given the billions of dollars spent on vegetation thinning, home-hardening and firefighting technology.

But members of the Senate Insurance Committee — including Chair Susan Rubio — expressed caution.

“The more pressure we put on them to do things that are new and innovative and that cost money the least likely we are to get them reopened,” said Sen. Anna Caballero in the hearing.

Becker’s bill ultimately squeaked through 4-2, with Caballero voting against it. It heads to Senate Appropriations next. — CvK

MANURE POST-MORTEM: Attempts to adjust state’s lucrative incentives for fuels derived from livestock manure to are also 0-2 this legislative session.

Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi’s AB 2870 would have drastically reduced the credit value of installing dairy digesters on farms to capture methane from manure lagoons and turn it into fuel. The bill made it out of the Assembly Natural Resources Committee on Monday after an hourlong discussion of whether crediting the digesters as more valuable than solar drives methane reductions or drives dairies to grow their herds and manage their farms to produce more methane gas for capture.

But Assembly Agriculture Committee Chair Esmeralda Soria pulled the bill from today’s hearing, leaving it no path forward this session, according to Jill Hindenach from the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, which co-sponsored the bill.

In response to a request for comment, Soria’s office sent documents from CARB defending the “avoided methane credits” for dairies as necessary for reaching California’s methane reduction targets.

It’s the second LCFS reform bill to die this session, after Sen. Ben Allen’s SB 709.

Environmental justice communities who say the digester credits are incentivizing more pollution in the San Joaquin Valley are still looking to CARB, which is in the middle of a rulemaking on the LCFS, for changes. At their last workshop, the agency didn’t include consideration of starting to phase out the avoided biomethane credits any earlier than the 2040 timeline staff had already proposed. — BB

MORE ON OFFSETS: We’ve written about Sen. Monique Limón’s SB 1036, a bill that would subject voluntary carbon offsets to the state’s False Advertising Law.

It’s nearly identical to Limón’s SB 390 that Newsom vetoed last year, and it’s currently awaiting the suspense file in the Senate Appropriations Committee after passing both the Senate Environmental Quality Committee and Senate Judiciary Committees.

POLITICO’s Eric He has an in-depth analysis of what we called Sacramento’s next big climate fight. Check it out on POLITICO Pro.

— Two of the top three U.S. cities most polluted by short-term particle pollution are in California, a new study shows.

— Weather-related power outages have been on the rise in California for decades. It’s a similar story around the country, a Climate Central analysis says.

— Earth’s melting ice is slowing down its rotation and driving up sea levels, scientists say.