November 19, 2003
Some PGE History As Many Continue To Boggle Over Neil Goldschmidt
Today's Willamette Week managed to crank out a story on the sudden news that one Texas firm (Enron) would be selling Portland General Electric to another Texas firm (Texas Pacific Group), which would then put it in the operating hands of an Oregon company headed by Neil Goldschmidt, opponent of public power and paid Pacific Power shill:
... The announcement was made Tuesday morning at a press conference by Neil Goldschmidt, the former mayor and governor. Goldschmidt will be the chairman of a new company called Oregon Electric Utility Company, and the money for Oregon Electric to buy the utility comes from Texas Pacific Group, a high-flying buyout company whose chairman hired the Rolling Stones to perform for his 60th birthday last year.
It's increasingly clear that the city's threat to condemn PGE drove the utility right into the hands of Texas Pacific. Mayor Vera Katz and City Commissioners Erik Sten and Randy Leonard were prepared to begin the process of seizing PGE's assets as soon as January. Yet until Tuesday morning they were completely in the dark about Goldschmidt's move.
WW then goes on, in painstaking and in some sense bizarrely painful detail, to offer something of an overview of the entire sordid and convoluted mess the entire PGE story has become. It also has a little something to say on the subject of public power:
Public power might seem radical in Portland, because we're used to PGE and PacifiCorp. But nationwide, according to federal government statistics, there are 2,008 publicly owned utilities and only 232 investor-owned utilities. Public power is about as common as drive-through espresso stands.
And if city ownership is a half-baked concept, don't tell people in Seattle, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Orlando and San Antonio, because they buy their electricity from their city governments.
But here's the important point--public power is cheaper. In 2001, the last year for which the feds have provided data, investor-owned utility rates were 20 percent higher than those charged by public utilities. The average gap in Oregon was 25 percent.
Meanwhile, tomorrow's Portland Mercury takes a stab at the surreal turn of business events as well.
Even more meanwhile, Jack Bogdanski breaks the "news" that today's freak weather was also part of a strange and sinister scheme by Goldschmidt, in a mock story which embarassingly puts me in mind of the evil Casadine clan which many, many years ago manipulated the weather on General Hospital.