Tag archives: utilities
Here they go again! It never ceases to amaze how far Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), a “public utility,” will go in harming the public interest. Their latest ploy is an attempt to surreptitiously resurrect the nearly 40-year-old Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, which is scheduled to close by 2025. They want to bring it back […]
Investor-Owned Utilities (“Utilities”) are plotting to kill California’s solar program. Apparently, avarice, and the ability to get away with causing 85 percent of area lost in recent forest fires in California, are not enough, and they are now coming up with ways to dramatically reduce all new solar installations in California. Can you believe that […]
The Montecito Association Land Use Committee met earlier this week, and took a look back at the major land use projects the committee worked on in 2020. “We recognized early on after the debris flow that there would be multiple large scale projects to tackle,” said MA Executive Director Sharon Byrne, adding that the projects […]
At the Montecito Association Land Use Committee, we decided to tackle undergrounding as a team. The Office of Assembly Member Monique Limón, representatives from the office of First District Supervisor Das Williams, Ventura County Supervisor Steve Bennett, and Hidden Hills Councilmember Laura McCorkindale joined us. We have several brave neighbors attempting to underground their utilities […]
For the first time in memory, there is momentum in California to usher in the clean, decentralized energy future that a growing number of Californians believe is necessary to combat climate change and improve community resiliency. It begins with reimagining how electric utilities conduct business. After the 2019 fire season, Public Safety Power Shutoffs resulted […]
Last week, two million fellow residents of the Golden State were intentionally blacked out by their public utilities without a whimper of protest from our publicly elected officials in Sacramento, Washington, D.C., or Santa Barbara County. Fortunately, Montecito, Carpinteria, and Montecito stayed alit, while residents of Goleta woke up last weekend to smoky air, face […]
The hottest topic last week was “When will we lose our power in Montecito?” And, if so, “How often and for how long?” In the past, some 60% of power blackouts have been caused by bad weather such as violent storms. However, 30% of power outages can be attributed to aging electrical grids that are […]
Sue Happy Supervisors The old saying, “What goes around, comes around,” should be the new County motto! That is, our County Board of Supervisors (BOS) has done virtually nothing to prevent forest fires by way of reducing fuel loads or creating adequate buffers between the urban and wildland interface. Moreover, they have not maximized the […]
At a gathering at the Mission Rose Garden on Tuesday afternoon, School Board member – and daughter of Walter and Lois Capps – Laura Capps formally announced her bid for First District Supervisor, challenging incumbent Das Williams in the March 3 primary election. Capps, surrounded by school children, including her son Oscar, her supporters, and […]
Dana Newquist stated in the latest MJ (#24/34) that the Montecito Sanitary District is “dumping partially treated sewage water just off shore at Butterfly Beach.” This is a false, slanderous statement. Secondary treatment is treated to the same level as tertiary treatment, but the salinity is modulated to match the ocean salinity. Tertiary is the […]
Last month, in response to a public request, Montecito Association (MA) Land Use Committee chair Cori Hayman identified the “Top 10 Issues” facing Montecito. The goal was to focus on making the village better than it was before the twin disasters of the Thomas wildfire and the January 9 debris flow. The Land Use Committee’s […]
One of the unexpected gifts of the twin tragedies of the Thomas Fire – the largest recorded wildfire in California’s history – and the subsequent Montecito mudslide, has been the outpouring of sympathy, compassion, and support from our neighbors in the City of Santa Barbara, Carpinteria, Summerland, Goleta, the rest of Santa Barbara County, and […]
What a ride this has been for us all. While we are not yet out of the woods of what will probably turn out to be the worst wildfire in California’s history, I write this letter with a cautious sense of optimism. There are still over 8,000 firefighters on this fire. On 12-hour shifts, there […]
