The governor's point person on the job, PUC President Loretta Lynch, had voted against the idea and was outraged.
Lynch, a Yale-educated attorney and veteran Democratic operative, was hardly a utilities expert. In a recent interview, she said she hadn't studied the crisis in depth until July 2000, after the governor ordered her to investigate the Bay Area blackout.
Like many officials at the time, Lynch didn't trust the big utilities, which before deregulation had been the major players. And legislative leaders who had championed the Power Exchange as the central feature of their deregulation plan were loath to weaken it.
Within days of the PUC vote, sources said, Lynch contacted allies in the Legislature. Language to overturn the vote was inserted in a budget bill that Davis signed into law a week later."
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Central Planning DOOFI. It appears the 'market solution' was short-circuited by legislative action. This IS a 'real crime', and we taxpayers had better not let this blatant 'abuse of power' go unpunished.
Davis' old dinner partners had the same trouble.
Duke Energy Corp. wrote him on July 31, offering to sell the state's utilities up to 2,000 megawatts of power under a five-year contract at $50 a megawatt-hour -- far below spot-market prices.
PG&E and Edison drooled over deals like this. But red tape at the Davis-controlled PUC, the utilities say, prevented them from signing contracts until much later. By then, they were well on their way to insolvency."
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What say you, guvner?