Politics
Anger builds over sweeping change in the way most Californians will pay for electricity
With little debate two years ago, state lawmakers passed a complex energy bill that enabled a sweeping change in how most Californians are billed for electricity.
The legislation was what Pacific Gas & Electric had asked for from the state public utilities commission three months before: a transformation of electric rates so that households would pay a fixed charge each month in exchange for lower rates for each kilowatt hour they used.
Gov. Gavin Newsom submitted the bill as part of a massive 2022 budget revision. In four days, it was passed out of an Assembly committee hearing without discussion, approved by the full Assembly and Senate and signed by Newsom.
The state’s three largest investor-owned power companies that pushed for the change say it will encourage Californians to ditch cars and appliances that run on planet-warming fossil fuels and replace them with vehicles, stoves and heaters that operate on electricity from solar panels and wind turbines. They also say the new monthly fee would allow them to more evenly allocate fixed costs among customers.
But opponents say the legislation was a financial gift to PG&E, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, and will cause millions of Californians who live in small homes or apartments that use little electricity to pay more, while residents in large homes that use a lot of electricity will save money.
“If you wanted to design a policy that would send the signal that conservation doesn’t count, this would be it,” said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group.
Now, as governor-appointed members of the California Public Utilities Commission prepare to approve a $24 monthly charge at a May 9 meeting, some lawmakers who voted for the original legislation are trying to reverse it. A coalition of more than 250 environmental and community groups are also protesting the law, claiming that its approval smacks of an all too cozy relationship between utility companies, regulators and think tank researchers.
Opponents complain that the new law eliminates a $10 cap on fixed charges that had been in place since 2013, and that there is now nothing to prevent the utilities from raising it higher and higher.
“There is a trend nationwide of utilities trying to move more of the payments they extract from ratepayers into fixed fees because they get that money no matter what,” said Cook. “This is easy money.”
Terrie Prosper, the CPUC’s director of strategic communications, said in a statement that the new rate structure “makes going electric more affordable for everyone, regardless of income, geography, or the size of their home.”
Someone who powers all their home appliances and their vehicle with electricity would save an average of $28 to $44 a month compared to the current billing structure, the commission estimates. (The law does not apply to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power or other municipal utilities.)
Prosper said customers would still be encouraged to conserve electricity in the evening hours when the grid is most stressed because the rate per kilowatt hour would be higher. This is similar to how current rates vary by the time of day, she said.
“The flat-rate design will not increase utility revenues,” Prosper said. “The flat rate is not a new fee — it simply reallocates how electricity costs are paid for on bills.”
Alex Stack, a spokesperson for Newsom, said that before the bill’s passage, the idea of the fixed fees had been repeatedly discussed at public meetings and budget hearings “as a potential solution for managing rising electric bills.”
Stack did not answer a question of whether Newsom proposed the bill at the utilities’ request.
And Prosper did not explain why the Newsom administration had introduced the fixed-fee language in a bill just days before the governor had to sign the budget and related legislation.
Already California has the nation’s second-highest electricity rates. Only rates in Hawaii are higher.
Michael Backstrom, SoCal Edison’s vice president of regulatory affairs, said the new fixed charge would ensure “everyone using the grid is paying for its operation and upkeep.”
“There is no additional cost being collected,” he said. “There’s no change to utility profits.”
PG&E and SDGE executives did not respond to several phone calls and emails seeking comment.
The inspiration for the new law came from a 2021 paper written by professors at UC Berkeley’s Energy Institute at Haas, which is partly funded by utility companies.
The paper detailed how costs for building renewable energy plants, burying power lines to reduce the risk of wildfire ignitions and compensating fire victims have pushed electric rates so high that they were discouraging Californians from buying electric cars and replacing their gas appliances.
The paper also said the rising number of homes with solar panels meant that fewer households were paying for these fast-rising expenses that go into calculating the rate per kilowatt hour charged by utilities.
The professors proposed that the rate per kilowatt hour be reduced while a new fixed charge be added to bills.
Fixed fees are considered to be regressive, since they are harder for lower-income people to pay than the wealthy. For this reason the professors proposed a fixed charge that was progressive and rose according to income.
Since 2018, Berkeley’s Energy Institute at Haas has received $205,000 from PG&E, $160,000 from Edison and $50,000 from SDGE, according to the institute.
The Solar Rights Alliance — a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of homeowners and businesses that use solar power — said the institute’s work of advising the government while receiving money from the utilities “suggests a serious conflict of interest.”
Severin Borenstein, an economics professor who was the lead author, said no organization is allowed to give more than 2% of the institute’s budget. And he said the electric companies had no influence on the 2021 paper.
“We are not doing the bidding of any of these people,” he said.
The utility companies liked the paper’s recommendations. In a March 2022 filing, PG&E argued for “swift adoption” of a fixed charge similar to what the professors had proposed.The company said legislation was needed “to either raise or ideally eliminate” the $10 cap.
Two months later, on May 13, 2022, Newsom released a 175-page revision to his proposed budget. In a paragraph on Page 63, he said he was proposing legislation “to adjust electricity rates to predetermined fixed charges.” That change, he said, would “enhance widespread electrification efforts.”
The state’s legislative tracking system shows the proposed language to do that first appeared on June 26, 2022. That’s when a measure, Assembly Bill 205, was amended to add pages of proposed energy legislation. Part of the bill allowed the state to buy power from the aging Diablo Canyon nuclear plant and to approve solar and wind farms over the objections of local governments.
It also contained language that eliminated the $10 cap and ordered the utilities commission to establish a fixed charge on an “income-graduated basis.”
AB 205 was what is known in Sacramento as a trailer bill to the state budget. The trailer bills are meant to enact law changes required by the governor’s proposed budget. But politicians have sometimes misused them to get complicated or controversial legislation passed with little public notice.
Lawmakers’ use of the trailer bills surged after voters passed Proposition 25, pushed through by Democrats and public employee unions in 2010, which said the budget and any related legislation would need just a majority vote, rather than two-thirds. Democrats now dominate the state’s legislature.
When AB 205 was introduced, a Democratic lawmaker called it “a crappy trailer bill that was dumped on us on late Sunday night.”
The next day, AB 205 and 28 other trailer bills addressing issues ranging from cannabis regulation to reproductive rights, were presented at a hearing of the Assembly Budget Committee.
According to a transcript, the committee’s leaders limited public discussion to one hour. The fixed electric charge was not mentioned.
“Unfortunately, having this one hearing for one hour mere hours after budget bills materialized is certainly not adequate,” said Assemblymember Vince Fong, a Bakersfield Republican, at the hearing.
The full Assembly and Senate passed the bill two days later. Newsom signed it the next day.
Last year, the three electric companies said that in accordance with AB 205 they were proposing fees as high as $128 a month for households with incomes over $180,000. Those earning $69,000 to $180,000 would pay a fixed monthly fee of as much as $73. Those making less than $69,000 would pay $15 to $34, depending on which company supplied their power.
The three companies said they would seek to increase the fixed charge if there was a “revenue imbalance” of 10%. Such an imbalance might occur if estimates of how much they would collect in fixed charges did not cover what they were losing in the lowered rates per kilowatt hour.
The companies’ proposal outraged some legislators.
A letter to the commission from 18 Democratic members of Congress pointed out that the average electricity consumption of each California resident had stayed nearly flat since the 1970s because of energy efficiency efforts.
“Imposing a high fixed charge may undercut these decades of progress by forcing people to pay their utility company before they even turn on the light switch,” the California representatives wrote.
In January, Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin, Democrat from Thousand Oaks, proposed a bill named AB 1999 to reverse much of what Newsom’s bill had done.
With criticism growing in late March, the commission said it was proposing a more modest monthly fixed charge of $24.15. Lower-income people would pay either $6 or $12 a month based on their circumstances.
But the commission’s proposal did not stop the complaints from households across the state or the coalition opposed to the new rate structure.
In an analysis conducted for the coalition, Josh Plaisted of Flagstaff Research estimated that households using more than 6,000 kilowatt hours a year would save more as they increased their electricity use. For example, a 2,500-square-foot home with a swimming pool might save more than $300 a year, he said.
“I think this is a surprise to most people,” Plaisted said. “You have low energy users subsidizing current high energy usage.”
The opposition was angered even more when Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) and other Assembly leaders stopped debate on Irwin’s bill late last month with a procedural move that shelved it for the legislative session.
Cynthia Moreno, the speaker’s press secretary, disputed claims that the Assembly leaders had killed the bill.
“We are continuing work on the issue this year, including possible amendments to ensure any changes in the fixed charge are revenue neutral for utilities and not a means to increase their profits,” she said.
Moreno said that Rivas appreciated the “legislative scrutiny of the PUC and the governor’s plan, and that oversight will continue.”
But while that is a new element in the talks, the cultural divide in how to negotiate is not.
That divide was evident 11 years ago, in the gilded halls of the 160-year-old Beau-Rivage Palace Hotel in Lausanne, Switzerland, where Secretary of State John Kerry and his counterparts from five other countries struggled to close a preliminary agreement with Iran. It was, perhaps, the closest analogue to what is unfolding now in Islamabad.
Every day the American delegation would speak about how many centrifuges had to be disassembled and how much uranium needed to be shipped out of country. Yet when Iranian officials — including Abbas Araghchi, now the Iranian foreign minister — stepped out of the elegant, chandeliered rooms to brief reporters, most of the questions about those details were waved away. The Iranians talked about preserving respect for their rights and Iran’s sovereignty.
“I remember we finally got the parameters agreed upon at the hotel,” Wendy Sherman, the chief U.S. negotiator at the time, said on Monday. “And then a few days later the supreme leader came out and said, ‘Actually, some very different terms were required.’”
Ms. Sherman, who went on to become deputy secretary of state in the Biden administration, would go into these negotiations with a large posse. She often had the C.I.A.’s top Iran expert in the room, or nearby. So was the energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, an expert in nuclear weapons design. Proposals floated by the Iranians would be sent back to the U.S. national laboratories, where weapons are designed and tested, for expert analysis of whether the agreements being discussed would keep Iran at least a year away from a bomb.
But Mr. Trump’s negotiating team travels light, with no entourage of experts and few briefings. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, the president’s son-in-law and the special envoy, learned their negotiating skills in New York real estate and say a deal is a deal. They say they have immersed themselves in the details of the Iran program, and know it well.
Politics
Soros-linked dark money network fuels Virginia redistricting push backed by national Democrats
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Virginians for Fair Elections, a main group fighting to get Virginia voters to approve a ballot referendum that will allow the state to redraw its congressional maps, has been pumped with millions in cash from a web of George Soros-backed dark money groups and top Democratic Party officials.
The money the group has garnered ahead of Tuesday’s vote, which is poised to allow Democrats in the House of Representatives to potentially take four seats from Republicans going into the midterms, also comes from leading Democratic Party figures and organizations like Nancy Pelosi and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
Other left-wing juggernauts pumping money into the Democratic Party’s redistricting effort in Virginia include the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Eric Holder’s National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which once championed the adoption of “independent redistricting commissions,” national green energy group the League of Conservation Voters, and the U.S. House of Representatives campaign arm for the Democratic Party, according to a Fox News Digital review of state campaign finance records and records from the Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP), which tracks public spending in Virginia.
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“Dark money is flooding into Virginia,” GOP strategist Matt Gorman told Fox News Digital. “Democrats talked all about the cost of living during the campaign, but all they did once in office was raise taxes and rig elections. It’ll be the same elsewhere across the country in 2026 too.”
A woman casts her vote at a polling place in Burke, Fairfax County, Virginia, in 2026. (Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg)
Fox News Digital reported in March that the left-wing group fighting to redraw Virginia’s maps raised more than $38 million, according to VPAP’s donation totals based on state campaign finance records. As of right before the mid-April referendum vote, just a handful of weeks later, that total ballooned to more than $64 million.
In 2026, the largest giver to Virginians for Fair Elections was House Majority Forward, the nonprofit counterpart of House Democrats’ House Majority PAC, which has donated over $38 million, records show.
Meanwhile, entities directly tied to Soros, or that obtained significant funding which can be traced back to the billionaire Democrat megadonor, come in second and third in terms of total giving to the group, per VPAP’s accounting of donation totals.
One of those groups, the Fund for Policy Reform Inc, was founded by Soros. The other, titled The Fairness Project, has been funded by groups like the Sixteen Thirty Fund, Hopewell Fund and the Tides Foundation, which Soros has given significant funding to.
George Soros pictured on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2020. (Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
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Another one of the top donors to the left’s Virginians for Fair Elections is American Opportunity Action, described as “a pure pass-through entity” by Parker Thayer, a dark money expert from the conservative Capital Research Center. The group is so new that it does not even appear to have any 990s filed with the IRS but is still one of Virginians for Fair Elections’ top donors, according to VPAP and state campaign finance records.
Top Democratic Party members of Congress from outside Virginia, including Reps. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., and Katherine Clark, D-Mass., also donated tens-of-thousands of dollars, according to a review of state campaign finance records. Democratic Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine’s leadership PAC donated $100,000 as well, while the Democratic Party of Virginia put up just shy of a million dollars, per VPAP’s accounting.
Meanwhile, a group founded by Obama wingman Eric Holder, who previously championed “independent redistricting commissions,” provided a more than $10,000 in-kind contribution to the left-wing redistricting group, state election filings show. The League of Conservation Voters, and the Soros-backed MoveOn.org were also among Virginians for Fair Election’s top donors. In terms of labor union support, SEIU gave half-a-million, while AFT gave $100,000.
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Fox News Digital reached out to Soros’ Open Society Foundations and the other top donors pumping thousands or millions into the redistricting battle, but did not receive a response ahead of publication.
“No one wanted to take this action, but in a democracy, we can’t let entire states rig their congressional maps just to bend to the will of one person,” Alexis Magnan-Callaway, a spokesperson for The Fairness Project, told Fox News Digital in March.
“We have to respond. This amendment is a temporary, one-time exception that gives Virginia voters a voice and meets the needs of the current moment, while ensuring Virginia’s bipartisan redistricting process will resume after the 2030 census,” she continued. “This isn’t about favoring one party over another. This is about restoring fairness across the board by temporarily changing Virginia’s congressional districts.”
A main group in Virginia opposing the redistricting effort led by Democrats, Virginians For Fair Maps, raised a little over $3 million at the time of Fox News Digital’s late March report. However, the right-wing redistricting group in Virginia appears to have gained some ground since then as well, albeit still far behind the left’s Virginians for Fair Elections funding totals.
As of just before the referendum vote Tuesday, the anti-redistricting referendum group raised its fundraising total to nearly $20 million, with most of that money coming from a group by the same name that is also a significant donor to the Virginia Republican Party.
Other donations to the group come from a series of several much smaller donors, such as $50,000 from the National Shooting Sports Foundation and $100,000 from a wealthy D.C.-area real-estate investor, who donates primarily to GOP campaigns. That investor is the top individual donor at $100,000 out of just a handful of individual contributions, according to VPAP.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin speaks during the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Policy Conference at the Washington Hilton on June 22, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
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Former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, has reportedly given more than $500,000 in efforts against the redistricting measure, per reporting from the Virginia Scope. He also has been a leading voice in Virginia holding events to campaign against the measure despite no longer being in office.
Wealthy tech entrepreneur and Republican donor Peter Thiel has reportedly donated to Justice for Democracy PAC, which has been part of the anti-redistricting effort alongside Virginians for Fair Maps as well.
The most unpredictable California governor’s race in recent history took another set of dizzying turns on Monday, with former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra surging after former Rep. Eric Swalwell dropped out in the face of sexual assault and misconduct allegations, and former state Controller Betty Yee ending her bid.
The race to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom is the first in a quarter of a century with no clear front-runner and a sprawling field of candidates who have been jockeying for the attention of Californians, who are just beginning to pay attention to the campaign two weeks before ballots arrive in their mailboxes.
“I certainly could not have imagined the twists and the disturbing turns that this race has taken,” Yee said as she announced she was dropping out. “But through it all, my values and my vision for California has never wavered.”
A poll released Monday by the state Democratic Party — its first since Swalwell (D-Dublin) dropped out — showed Becerra’s support jumped nine points to 13%, placing him in a tie with Tom Steyer, the billionaire hedge fund founder turned environmental warrior. Former Rep. Katie Porter of Orange County saw a slight bump to 10% from 7%, while the remaining Democrats in the contest were mired in the low single digits.
The party began the surveys out of concern that Democrats could be shut out of the governor’s race because of California’s unique primary system, where the top two vote-getters in the June 2 primary move on to the November general election regardless of political party.
“I continue to believe there are too many Democrats in the field,” California Democratic Party Chairman Rusty Hicks told reporters Monday. “My call for candidates to honestly assess the viability of their candidacy and campaigns still stands, especially if you are stalled in the single digits, seeing financial resources dry up and/or are failing to pick up additional support.”
Hicks and other party leaders and allies had unsuccessfully urged low-polling candidates to reconsider their candidacies before the filing deadline in an attempt to cull the field and avoid splintering the Democratic vote. Though most did not name candidates who they thought should think about their viability, Yee was widely believed to be among them.
Yee became emotional as she said on Monday that she decided to withdraw from the race because she wasn’t able to raise the resources necessary to compete in the state. She also said her message of competency and experience wasn’t resonating among voters who were seeking a fiery foil to President Trump, not “Boring Betty,” as she dubbed herself. Yee said she would assess the field before making an announcement on whether she would endorse one of her fellow Democrats.
Becerra was another candidate believed to be a target of party leaders’ efforts to shrink the field. But he held on and apparently benefited from Swalwell’s downfall.
“I’m not the richest candidate, I’m not the slickest candidate, but I am the guy that’s got you,” Becerra said, rallying supporters in Los Angeles on Saturday.
The audience was filled with members of labor groups backing the longtime politician, and Becerra told them he’d serve as a “union man” in the governor’s office.
Pro- and anti-Becerra forces tussled outside the town hall after two people, who declined to identify whom they were working for, passed out fliers highlighting critical media investigations of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services during the migrant crisis when the agency was led by Becerra.
Pro-Becerra attendees grabbed the fliers and told the men to go away, prompting a security guard to intervene.
The question is whether Becerra, who also served as state attorney general, a member of Congress and a state Assembly member, can raise the funds necessary to compete in a state with some of the nation’s most expensive media markets. And he was tied in the state party poll with a billionaire who dumped an additional $12.1 million of his own money into his campaign last week.
Steyer’s total investment in his bid reached $133 million, according to the California secretary of state’s office. He also received the endorsement of Our Revolution, a progressive political organization founded by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
“We’ve never endorsed a billionaire — but Tom Steyer is using his position to upset the system,” the group posted on X on Monday. “As Our Revolution executive director Joseph Geevarghese told @theintercept, ‘He’s been a partner in the movement. Most billionaires have used their wealth and privilege to lock in the status quo. Tom is doing the opposite.’”
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who is also running for governor, accused Steyer of hypocrisy for the hedge fund he founded profiting from investments in private prisons being used to house ICE detainees, and Steyer calling for the abolishment of ICE.
Steyer got “rich investing off the ICE infrastructure he now wants to abolish,” Mahan posted on Instagram.
Steyer, who sold his stake in the hedge fund in 2012, has said he ordered the company to divest from the private prison company and has repeatedly expressed remorse about his former firm’s ties with the detention company.
Mahan also appeared Monday at a Hollywood production lot to announce his proposal for a special fund to lure sporting events, concerts and other productions to California as part of his plan to help the struggling film and television industry.
An independent effort supporting Mahan has also raised roughly $11 million since Swalwell left the race.
Mehta reported from Los Angeles and Nixon from Sacramento. Times staff writer Dakota Smith contributed to this report.
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