According to the recent New Times (“SLO reps to lobby for Diablo Canyon settlement at CPUC hearing,” Nov. 23), our “county representatives and elected officials” are ganging up to convince the California Public Utilities Commission to kick our county’s major employer out of town, thereby ridding our community of thousands of jobs and effectively banishing way more than a thousand families from a community that they have lived in and served for decades. Maybe it’s just me, but this seems not only stupid but profoundly unjust. It is not often one sees representatives working so assiduously against the interests of thousands of their constituents and the community as a whole. It seems to me that our community would be better served if these representatives and elective officials were the ones run out of town, and the quicker the better.
In fairness, these numbskulls are working on softening the economic blow to the community by proposing that an $85 million settlement be paid by someone. The only problem they are having is figuring out who to steal the $85 million from: the taxpayers, the ratepayers, maybe both, or better yet, PG&E as a penalty for being forced to shut down their Diablo operations. It is pretty much a waste of time. PG&E pays about $30 million annually in property and sales taxes, and over a period of a 20-year extension this would amount to some $600 million in tax revenue, not to mention many billions in indirect economic benefits. Subtracting the $85 million “settlement” still leaves more than half a billion dollars lost to the community over a 20-year period, and our schools will be particularly hard hit. It is no secret who will have to pay for this shortfall … local taxpayers of course. The proposed “settlement” is a complete joke; a mere scheme intended to allow the responsible officials and deluded groups like Mothers for Peace to convince themselves and others that their efforts will not cause disastrous social and financial consequences to our community.
It is clear that the best thing we can do for our community and the future of our young people would be to identify these “county representatives and elected officials” and work together to remove them from office as swiftly as possible.
Mark Henry
San Luis Obispo
This article appears in Nov 30 – Dec 10, 2017.
I was at the California PUC hearing for taking community comments on the “Joint Proposal” by PG&E . This proposal was hatched in secret by PG&E working with the worst enemies of clean, global warming-fighting nuclear power. If this proposal is so fair, why was it done in secret with these one-sided players? This stinks.
One by one, agency heads, and local government heads marched to the mike to say they were for this damaging blow to the community. Mark Henry is right – all these people betrayed the community by following some secret order to praise the loss of $1 billion coming into the community from Diablo Canyon operations each year. The Chamber of Commerce approved the loss to local businesses they are supposed to protect!
The environment will lose its best weapon locally against global warming – carbon free atomic produced electricity. What kind of people support this travesty?
Take action people. Protect yourselves because nobody else will. If you do nothing, don’t whine when utility rates increase, CO2 emissions rocket upwards, soot, smoke and ozone enter your children’s lungs from the fossil fuel that will take over Diablo’s clean work.
William Gloege
Santa Maria, CA
On behalf of Californians for Green Nuclear Power, Inc. (CGNP), a local nonprofit corporation, I delivered CGNP’s final oral rebuttal at CPUC headquarters against the allies of fossil fuel that want to shut down Diablo Canyon on November 28, 2017. I learned that the proposal to shut down Diablo Canyon was developed during secret meetings over a six-month span. CGNP has gathered information from energy and climate experts in our testimony. The replacement of reliable, emission-free Diablo Canyon power by new wind and new solar by 2025 is a physical impossibility. During a half-year period ending on January 31, 2017, Diablo Canyon generated about 108% of ALL of California’s solar power – or about 178% of all of California’s wind power. If this proposal is accepted, the reality will be the importation of huge amounts of PacifiCorp’s really dirty coal power from Wyoming, at a greater cost to ratepayers than if that power was produced by keeping Diablo Canyon open!