You know whose heads aren’t quite screwed on straight? The folks over at Central Coast Community Energy (also known as 3CE), which pulled a little bait-and-switch on all the people who were promised PG&E rate discounts when the electric utility traveled up and down the coast marketing itself to local cities and counties.
At the time, 3CE promised millions in savings on utility bills.
“Discounts themselves—that goes away entirely,” 3CE Chief Operating Officer Rob Shaw said.
Why? Well, they kind of, sort of, maybe didn’t end the fiscal year in the black. They ended it $500,000 in the hole. In other words, those much-touted discounts the community choice energy provider used to sell its product to you—Joe and Jane Consumer—made it so that 3CE didn’t bring in enough revenue to pay its operating expenses. Governing bodies, amirite?
All you told-you-so conservatives out there are going to say “I told you so!”
But really, when you run a utility like a business, you get PG&E, which burned down part of California because it didn’t invest enough in infrastructure maintenance. Cutting corners to maintain that nice profit doesn’t really work either.
Plus for some stupid reason, PG&E’s rates constantly fluctuate throughout the year, which was one of the issues that 3CE had with the discounts. Because PG&E’s rates were changing, 3CE’s rates needed to change—and that level of uncertainty made it hard to predict revenues.
So there you have it. Both structures, either investor-owned or government-run, suck.
Three jeers for us!
And three jeers for the Santa Maria-Bonita School District too! The elementary and junior high school district decided that its junior high school campuses still needed school resource officers—cops—to be present.
At the school board’s June 23 meeting, Board President Linda Cordero called school resource officers “helpers” who could offer “assistance with a variety of things.” But cops aren’t traditionally viewed as that, are they Cordero? Especially in a largely immigrant community of color, full of youth who likely already have to deal with an unwanted police presence in their lives—and some of those encounters are likely unpleasant, dripping with discriminatory policing.
As Boardmember Ricardo Valencia put it, “For many of our youth, seeing a police officer is actually a very scary thing.”
Yes it is. As it is for most people.
And aren’t there better ways to accomplish whatever the district is trying to accomplish? We’re talking about children, here.
Boardmember John Hollinshead called spending money on resource officers “a really dated and antiquated” way for the district to spend its money. That money could be spent on things like mental health programs, performing arts, and college and career path opportunities, he argued.
And these are all things that could give underserved students a leg up in the world.
Oh come on guys! Isn’t instilling a healthy fear of corporal punishment into a bunch of children and preteens a good way to make them behave and think about their future?
I’m not sure I’d want my mini-me bumping into an armed officer at Canary Elementary—even if he/she/they was a DARE instructor who taught them that sniffing fermented birdseed might ruin their lives.
What sort of message are we sending to them?
The Canary gets the message but doesn’t like it. Send thoughts for publication to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 8-15, 2021.
