PRIORITIES • Lower Cost of Living • Policy to

End PG&E’s Monopoly and Lower Your Bills

Why I believe this — and how I’ll fight for it.

I grew up in a small town where the utility bill was something we fought about. I remember arguing with my mom over the thermostat — pulling on a second sweatshirt because it was too cold, and we couldn’t afford to turn the heat up, or lying awake on the hot nights because cooling the house cost more than we had. I remember it — and families all over this district are living some version of it right now.

Here’s why. PG&E is the only option you’ve got — a company you never chose, and a company that knows you can’t leave has no reason to keep your bill low. That’s a monopoly: no competition, no pressure to do better, nowhere else to go. So the rates keep climbing — among the highest in the country — while the service doesn’t.

And the monopoly doesn’t just keep your bill high — it’s a big part of why our district keeps burning. A company with no competition has no real pressure to spend money on maintaining aging lines and clearing the brush around them, because there’s no rival waiting to take your business when it fails. So the work gets deferred, a line goes down in the wind, and a town is gone — homes, businesses, whole communities, and in the worst of them, people’s lives. You pay for that too. The damages, the settlements, the rebuilding costs get folded right back into your rates and into ratepayer-funded bailouts, and your insurance premiums climb across the whole district because of fire risk the company created. The monopoly sparks the fire, and then bills you for it. That’s the loop I’m running to break.

And here’s the part that should make you angry: this monopoly is perfectly legal. It was handed to PG&E and protected for decades by the very politicians it funds — a scandal I lay out in full on our Fight Corruption page. But you don’t need to follow every dollar to know your bill is too high. Here’s how I’ll bring it down.

Here’s what I’ll do — and why

Break the monopoly by legally letting others compete — and here’s how. You don’t break a monopoly by hoping one giant company behaves — you end the one-company setup itself. I’ll fight to pass laws that let municipal and public providers build their own power and link it together into a shared grid — competition and collaboration in place of a single company that owns everything — and require the transmission lines be opened to them, so they can actually deliver it. And I’ll back it with federal financing: the same kind of low-cost federal loans and guarantees that electrified rural America, steered to communities here that want to build or join public power, so the up-front cost stops being the wall. Sacramento already did it — SMUD, right next door, is publicly owned and charges far less. Our communities deserve that same shot.

Take on the guaranteed-profit racket — with the FTC. There’s something hiding on your bill: a company like PG&E is handed a guaranteed profit — a “rate of return” — and a small handful of consultants travel state to state, hired by utility after utility, to argue that number ever higher, often on stretched math. The more they push it up, the more you pay — and you even foot the bill for the consultants brought in to raise your rates. When the same few players are quietly inflating everyone’s bills, that’s a racket. I’ll press the FTC to investigate that coordination and shut it down.

Get everything that isn’t the direct cost of your power off your bill. Too many of PG&E’s charges have nothing to do with keeping your lights on — lobbying, fighting off competition, executive perks, all buried in what you pay. The rule should be simple: you pay for the audited, directly attributed cost of delivering your energy, and nothing else. Everything else comes out of PG&E’s profit, not your statement — with independent audits to prove it.

Tie executive pay to safety — and make executives liable. When PG&E cuts corners and sparks a fire, the payouts land right back on you, the ratepayer. So change who carries the risk: tie executives’ pay to safety and affordability, claw back their bonuses when they fail, and hold them personally — financially and legally — liable for the fires their negligence causes. Put the risk on the people making the decisions, and you get fewer disasters, fewer billion-dollar payouts, and lower bills for the rest of us.

End the ratepayer-funded bailouts — period. When PG&E’s negligence burns down a town, the cost belongs to its shareholders and executives — not to you. You are not PG&E’s insurance policy, and I’ll fight to end the bailouts that put the price of the company’s failures on your bill. And none of this is new spending: breaking the monopoly, cleaning up your bill, and ending the bailouts send the savings straight back to ratepayers, not into some new program.

What this means for Our District

It comes down to this: we need a representative who isn’t the single largest recipient of PG&E money in all of Congress. Because that is exactly what our own congressman is. Our district pays some of the highest power bills in the country, while just across the river SMUD’s customers pay a fraction of what we do for the same electricity — the difference between a utility that answers to its customers and one that answers to Wall Street. When the man who’s supposed to fight for your lower bill is the biggest beneficiary of the company raising it, you already know whose side he’s on. We can’t keep sending the most PG&E-funded politician in Congress to Washington and expect our bills to fall. We need someone who fights to lower your costs, not to protect their profit. I take nothing from PG&E, and I never will.

The bottom line

No one should have to pull on a second sweatshirt because the heat costs too much, or lie awake because they can’t afford to cool their own home. Your bill should reflect the honest cost of keeping your lights on — nothing more. Let communities build their own power, drag the hidden charges into the light, hold the executives accountable, and end the bailouts, and we can do the thing they’ve told you is impossible: make the bill go down. That starts by sending someone to Washington the monopoly doesn’t own — someone who fights to lower your bills, not to protect PG&E’s profit.

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