What Do You Think About a Ballot Initiative to Form Something Like a Public Utility District?

PGE’s CEO, Maria Pope, makes $7 million a year. NW Natural’s David Anderson gets $3.5 million. I find that disgusting, and anyway, shouldn’t utilities be responsible to the communities they serve rather than to shareholders? What do you think about a ballot initiative to form something like a public utility district? —Christopher H.

It’s been tried! 2003′s Measure 26-51 would have created a public utility board, clearing the way for the city of Portland to refashion PGE into a public utility along the lines of the Water Bureau. Unfortunately for Trotskyites like you and me, this effort was defeated by a 3-to-1 margin. You could argue that this was a respectable showing—proponents were outspent by over 60 to 1—but a nail-biter it wasn’t.

Could we try again? Don’t hold your breath. That drubbing at the polls notwithstanding, conditions in 2003 were actually more favorable for a takeover than they are today. For starters, PGE was actively looking for a buyer at the time, thanks to the spectacular implosion of erstwhile parent company Enron. Meanwhile, PGE’s association with the aforementioned company—whose name, even today, is synonymous with corporate sleaze—tended to support the argument that the utility could no longer be trusted to run itself.

Finally, as someone who was around (though heavily sedated) in 2003, I can attest that the air in those days was suffused with a dewy-eyed optimism about local government’s ability to take on complex administrative challenges that modern Portlanders would scarcely recognize, much less share. Water Bureau 2.0? Good luck with that. Sadly, we’ll never know what might have been.

Or will we? As it happens, voters in Boulder, Colo.—motivated by fossil-fuel concerns Portlanders would find quite familiar—approved a similar measure in 2011. Like 26-51, it funded the exploration of a takeover, and gave the city the power to move forward with municipalization once the pieces were in place.

How did it go? Ask me in 10 years—it hasn’t happened yet. Even in a city of 110,000, the administrative challenges have been formidable, and Xcel Energy has, predictably, pushed back. In 2020, Boulder officials agreed to suspend the takeover effort in exchange for a zero-carbon promise from Xcel, suggesting that the threat of municipalization may be a more useful vehicle for change than the thing itself. Nothing so concentrates a corporation’s mind, it seems, as the knowledge that it’s going to be deprivatized in the morning.

Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.