November 07, 2003
More On PUD Failure, PGE, And City Hall
First, for those who might want it, here is the Mayor's statement on the PUD failure and how it plays into the City's efforts at a PGE take-over.
Meanwhile, today's Portland Tribune also examines all this interconnectedness:
PGE chief Peggy Fowler thinks that the city's controversial effort to buy the utility is more personal than professional and can be summed up in two words: Erik Sten.
City Commissioner Sten, for his part, thinks that Portland General Electric should stop avoiding essential questions and join the impending public debate about its future.
And Enron? Well, PGE's owner still finds itself a long way from being the most popular firm in town. But PGE officials were nonetheless buoyed by the resounding defeat of a plan to take the company's Multnomah County assets for a people's utility district.
Meanwhile, members of the Portland City Council were informally polled by the Portland Tribune this week and remain more determined than ever to pursue purchase of PGE.
Such are the aftershocks of the PUD vote this week.
Fowler also repeats her recently oft-heard assertion that it "sends a pretty clear message that people want to keep PGE" while Sten counters that it's an "insult to the average person's intelligence to say they're not capable of seeing a different proposal on its own merits."
There's also a good deal of Fowler trying to personalize this into being about Commissioner Sten, despite a solid majority of the City Council (Sten, of course, being only one on a council of five) wanting to continue pursuing the discussion. This tends to suggest to me that PGE intends to mount another campaign driven by distortions rather than solid debate.
A sidebar to the article provides an update of sorts to the legal challenge regarding the ballot title of Measure #26-52 and its misleading statement regarding property taxes, which appears to be pressing forward under the argument that the underlying issue requires addressing for the sake of future elections.