George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 28 October 2020.]

Dear Gov Newsom – This is an open letter to you from an old and very disgruntled citizen who has spent the last 63 years of his life in this beautiful state.  During these decades I went to school, earned my living, raised my family here, and watched the steady decline of a once golden state.  And I can attest that it truly was the Golden State because I was there.

Today, after decades of a virtual political monopoly in Sacramento, our state has landed on the bottom of the barrel with several other equally discredited states.  We purposely raised our taxes to the highest levels, became the leader in regulatory burdens heaped on our businesses and homeowners, and are now the hands down mecca of the nation’s welfare recipients – one out of three live here.  We lead the nation in the number of homeless, and invite their filthy tent favelas that now stretch from the coastal cities to the Sierra foothills.  Our food and fuel prices have sky rocketed to the highest in the nation.  Our roads, bridges, and other infrastructures are in third-world disrepair, public employee pensions are unfunded to the tune of unpayable billions, and businesses and middle-class taxpayers are departing in droves to greener pastures.

Add to this California’s highest electricity costs and disastrous power outages that now resemble the availability of electricity in second and third world countries, and you almost have the complete picture of where we are today and the direction we’re headed tomorrow.  (more here) And that, because the state’s legislative and regulatory pipeline is chuck full of a lot more of what already pains us.  But governor, this is just a short summary of California’s deficits and decline, about which long and detailed books have been written.  On top of all this, the state’s political leaders and bureaucrats have created a problem that’s even more up close and personal, one that affects all Californians, especially those of us who live in the rural counties.

Decades of forest and wildland mismanagement by all agencies of government and their incompetently run power utilities continue to present a clear and present danger from wildfires. However, in the last years these politicized management failures have become a major disruption to our lives and livelihoods.  Specifically, I am talking about the travesty of public safety and power shortage shut-offs.  Turning off power to millions of already over-charged utility customers should be a criminal act since power shortage shut-offs are the result of abysmally poor planning practices that range from your office all the way down to the sinecured bureaucrats working for the public utilities.

And the anticipative public safety power shutoffs are totally unnecessary.  In northern California PG&E has had decades to survey and maintain their high-voltage long lines through marginally accessible landscapes.  As a result, today the likelihood of windblown vegetation caused fires should be very low.  And downed vegetation caused fires in built-up populated areas are within minutes of fire departments that can respond quickly.  All this makes large-scale public safety power shutoffs a dubious policy.  For the tens of thousands of us without power and without wind, these all have the appearance of politically motivated CYA operations. 

What reinforces this assessment is that no one from any utility or government agency has offered a more detailed reasonable basis for these power shutoffs.   Managing these shutoffs over large populated areas is a complex systems problem.  And optimizing the details of power shutoff policies should have been done long ago by our state’s technicians.  We are the technology leader in the Union, yet our governments’ application of appropriate technologies and sciences resides on the fringes of pre-enlightenment feudalism.

During weather events an obvious public safety policy is to keep the power on, pre-position fire-fighting resources, and immediately start monitoring the high-voltage long lines from the air.  The marginal cost of this early warning tactic would be more than made up by the uninterrupted revenues from rate payers.  Populated built-up areas need little monitoring since these already contain fire-safed properties, and people who live there can call the fire department. No one has explained why this obvious response policy would not work.  Instead, we behave as compliant sheep doing the same ol’ same ol’ to satisfy some mysterious purpose known only to our elites.

Gov Newsom, all Californians look to you to bring about some positive changes for a change.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.