San Francisco, CA
San Francisco lawmaker to propose plan to let cities break away from PG&E
Just two months ago, a massive power outage left parts of San Francisco in the dark for days, and some lawmakers are trying to make sure it never happens again.
“San Francisco has been trying to break up with PG&E for a long time,” said Democratic Senator Scott Wiener. “The rates are extremely high and we know that public power can bring lower rates.”
Wiener says he will announce legislation on Monday that would allow San Francisco and other cities to break away from PG&E and form publicly owned utility companies, and do it quickly.
“San Francisco has already triggered a process to break away at the California Public Utilities Commission, but it is unbelievably slow, it’s taken years and years,” explained Wiener. “The standards set under the law are very unfavorable to a city wanting to break away.”
A professor at UC Berkeley and faculty director of the Energy Institute at Haas School of Business, Severin Borenstein, says he has an idea about what this could look like.
“It means trying to buy out their poles and wires to be the distributor of electricity in the city,” said Borenstein. “San Francisco is already its own entity in securing its electricity from generators. What would change, potentially, is they could own the specific distribution lines.”
He says it could benefit the city if they feel they can do a better job maintaining the lines, and they may be able to reduce the cost. But Borenstein explains that some of the reduction in cost could be because San Francisco and other urban areas are subsidizing the more rural areas in PG&E territory, particularly in fire-prone areas.
“If the cities opt out, or could opt out of PG&E territory, what that’s going to mean is all of those wildfire costs, which are really unavoidable, that’s what climate change is doing to us, will be shifting on to the remaining rate payers,” said Borenstein.
Borenstein thinks it could start a domino effect of cities wanting to form their own utility companies, and other lawmakers may want to avoid it.
“I don’t think the legislature is going to be very supportive of this because I think a lot of legislatures understand if we go down this road there’s going to be a crisis in the areas that are left holding the bag,” said Borenstein.
Alameda and Palo Alto already have city-run utilities. Wiener believes San Francisco can join them.
“Right now, PG&E, it is a publicly traded corporation,” Wiener stated. “It is beholden to Wall Street and investors and its bottom line. And public power allows you to break away from that and to focus on the public interest and not on the needs of shareholders.”
San Francisco, CA
VIDEO: Car crashes into SF Castro restaurant, driver flees scene
SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — Dramatic video shows a car smashing into dining parklets and a restaurant in San Francisco. The crash happened happeend before 2 a.m. on Sunday, and no one was injured.
As of Sunday night, police are still trying to locate and identify the driver who ran away. In the video, after airbags were deployed from the crash, the driver was seen leaving the car behind.
The car crashed into Castro Indian Restaurant and bar owner Ajay Khadka says he got an alert and arrived within 15 minutes. After reviewing his security video, he says he saw people standing in the area just moments before the crash.
“People were just walking around like that second, not even a minute; no one was there. So thank god nobody got hurt; otherwise it would be devastating,” Khadka said.
Police responded to investigate but were unable to find the driver. The victimized restaurant has been part of the Castro for nearly two decades and is now boarded up.
Manager Narmela Khordians says she got a call from the landlord about an hour after closing and rushed back to the restaurant.
“I’m hurt; it was an emotional feeling last night,” Khordians said. “I hope the police will arrest him. He needs to pay the price for it because this is not fair for small businesses for people. I’m glad we were closed because it could have been worse.”
Despite damage to the front of the restaurant and its parklet, Cafe Mystique reopened Sunday.
“Normally, we are very busy for Sunday brunch, so it affected our business as you see,” Khordians said. “Even though we tried to open, we had some customers who wanted to eat. Still, it’s not what we usually do. So it did affect our business, definitely.”
The restaurant is facing repairs that may cost as much as $25,000, according to Khadka. As of now, no arrests have been made.
KRON4 followed up with police asking if the car was stolen but did not hear back in time for this report.
San Francisco, CA
Tony Vitello just lost the only Giants allies he has left
Bullet point summary by AI
- San Francisco Giants manager Tony Vitello faces mounting criticism after his recent public remarks about his team’s performance.
- Vitello’s approach has begun to fracture the unity within the clubhouse just as the season heads toward a critical juncture.
- The front office now weighs whether to make broader changes or let the rookie manager work through his growing pains.
The San Francisco Giants lost five straight games heading into Sunday’s contest against the Colorado Rockies. While Rafael Devers has turned his season around to some degree, the same cannot be said of manager Tony Vitello, whose antics have put him between a rock and a hard place. Vitello’s hiring was a controversial one to begin with, as he had no big-league experience but thrived at the collegiate level with the Tennessee Volunteers. Buster Posey surely couldn’t have seen this season’s struggles coming.
Vitello hasn’t maintained his composure well this season, and it’s starting to impact the Giants clubhouse as this season fades into obscurity. Posey himself has stayed relatively quiet on Vitello’s future, and if Giants fans had their way he’d likely be a one-and-done manager. Vitello’s players, to their credit, have stayed together…until now. Over the weekend, the first-time MLB manager questioned his players’ effort and pride, a tactic that may have worked for him in Knoxville but will surely backfire in a larger market like San Francisco.
Tony Vitello betrayed the trust of Giants players
The Giants took a 6-3 lead in Friday’s game against the Rockies, but eventually blew that advantage in an 8-6 defeat. They fell behind quickly on Saturday in Colorado as well.
There’s only so much a manager can do to shoulder blame when his players aren’t performing up to par. However, blaming them to the media isn’t going to sit well in the clubhouse.
“We need to take a little more pride, I think, in how we…It’s ideal to not have last night occur, but bounce back,” Vitello told the media. “I got the vibe like we were in a position to do that. The first six outs we had at the plate would say that, but getting in a hole makes it a little tougher after that.”
Vitello isn’t necessarily wrong in his commentary of the Giants’ play of late, and even what he perceives as a lack of effort. However, he’d be wise to keep that criticism internal and call clubhouse leaders into his office to better apply that feedback.
Are bigger changes coming for the San Francisco Giants?
Speaking of fair criticism, this is one the players could surely push back onto their first-time manager: Vitello is in over his head. The Giants have already reassigned third-base coach Hector Borg in a wake-up call of sorts. If that doesn’t work — and the five straight losses suggest it hasn’t — then perhaps larger changes are looming.
Posey could opt to sell at the trade deadline. While Devers and Willy Adames are likely here to stay thanks to their large contracts, Robbie Ray is an attractive trade asset for contending teams and is on the final year of his deal. FanSided’s Chris Landers ranked Ray ninth on his trade deadline big board just last week.
“Ray…is an open and shut case: He’s in the final year of his five-year contract, and while he’s no longer the power pitcher he was in his prime, he’s still got gas left in the tank as a No. 4 starter who could even pivot to a valuable bullpen role in the postseason,” Landers wrote.
Posey and the Giants should not rush to panic and fire Vitello in season. Doing so defeats the entire purpose of hiring him. Vitello is learning on the job. Perhaps he’ll find his footing in the dog days of summer. Criticizing his own players, who thus far have had his back, isn’t a step in the right direction.
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San Francisco, CA
I’m a San Francisco bar operator. Young tech bros are going sober — but they still want to sip on mocktails
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Greg Lindgren, a 57-year-old bar operator from San Francisco. He co-owns 15 Romolo, The Cordial, Rye Cocktail Bar, and the events company Rye on the Road with Jon Gasparini. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
In San Francisco, you throw a rock, and you hit a laptop.
We started in the industry at the adolescence of the 1.0 boom. I have friends who worked for Webvan. Over the years, we’ve worked for all of the household names in the PayPal Mafia that survived the first crash and created the second wave.
When we opened Rye, we went to Google ourselves. The first result was a Yelp review. This was 2006. The person who made the review was the sixth hire at Yelp. I recognized his name, because there’s a lot of convergence between real-life social and tech.
We have a warehouse in SoMa. We’re a half block away from where Twitter was founded. This building was a temporary place where Airbnb, pre-IPO, was building its business. We get mail for Brian Chesky.
We’ve had a front row seat. “Silicon Valley” is a documentary. It’s a lot of fun to watch and be a part of it.
The trend toward abstaining from drinking has been ongoing for a while. Around the time that people started looking at alternative forms of eating, they were toying around with cutting back on alcohol.
It’s been gaining momentum over the last few years. It’s not just health, and it’s not just trying to have that edge.
There’s a new gold rush happening. The miners in the last year and a half are mostly young men. Some of them are abstaining from a health-maxxing standpoint. Other people just didn’t drink; they’re already of that generation.
There’s a herd mentality to tech, especially when so many people have arrived so recently. Smart people adopt this lifestyle and say, “I need to signal to everyone around me that I have all the edge, and that we’re not going to succumb to distraction.” One of the things in that conversation is alcohol consumption.
Those same people are taking other things. It’s more of an older generation, but people of the VC class are getting one-shotted on ayahuasca.
There are still groups that hit it hard. An example: young parents. When you have kids, you stop going to bars and restaurants, and you hunker down for a few years. Once their kids are preschoolers or elementary schoolers, those parents come roaring back. It’s like they’ve been let out of prison.
The same thing holds true for various tech cultures. We work with a company that’s in-person five days a week and is heavily sales-driven. They built a whole bar within their corporate headquarters, and we’re the contract bar that services that. There’s a social bonding aspect.
Mocktails are all the rage at tech events
More than a few years ago, we saw the writing on the wall, and that’s when we went into mocktails.
We work with a company that’s a household name. We’ve gone there on several occasions with beer, wine, and a cocktail available. We’ll watch as the mocktail that we brought is the thing that everybody’s drinking. We’re happy to be there.
Everything is better and more professional by having a service like ours there, whether or not they’re drinking alcohol at 4 in the afternoon. It helps with breaking the ice to have something in your hand. It’s not going to be a cigarette, and you can only have so much caffeine.
The people who assemble these events look at reactions. It’s similar to having a cool photo booth; it’s something people remember.
The business model hasn’t shifted. I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve been hired to do just non-alcoholic drinks. There has not been a reduction in price or a rejection of the offering as people change their event curation.
So far, companies are not fixating on: “Hey, we noticed that a lot of people are drinking less alcohol.” They’re asking: “Did we have a great event? Did we get everyone together, whether they drank sparkling water or an old-fashioned?”
That’s what we see in the current landscape. It hasn’t slowed our business down.
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