‘Patience is wearing thin.’ Year of misfortunes tests Gavin Newsom’s political standing

Gov. Gavin Newsom ends most press conferences these days with a series of pleas that have become familiar during the pandemic: wear a mask, keep your distance, stay home if you can.

On Friday, he had to add a new one: turn off your lights.

That evening, demand for power outstripped capacity anyway. The state saw its first rolling blackouts since the 2001 energy crisis that helped cost then-Gov. Gray Davis his job in a recall election.

This time it’s heat, not corporate grid gaming, forcing utilities to cut power. But the public likely doesn’t care, said Garry South, a Democratic strategist who worked closely with Davis.

“To the average consumer out there, it’s the same damn thing,” South said. “They don’t have power.”

That could spell political trouble for Newsom, who is already drawing criticism from those who want to state to reopen schools and the economy more quickly.

He’s coping with what he calls an “ancient” computer system that is swamped with unemployment claims and IT glitches that led to an undercount of COVID-19 cases. His regular press conferences are dogged on Facebook by hair salon owners tired of working outside, those who doubt the coronavirus information he shares and people who mock his advice to wear masks.

“The next seven, eight, nine, 10 days, we’re going to experience record-breaking temperatures,” the Democratic governor warned during the Friday event, which devoted largely to remote education amid the coronavirus. “To the extent warranted and possible, reduce your electricity consumption between the hours of 3 and 8 p.m.”

Twenty years ago, Davis was the one asking Californians to cut their power usage. He made the Grinch-like move of turning off the lights on the Capitol Christmas tree as a symbol of the need to conserve.

“People expect government to do basic things like keep people healthy and keep the lights on,” said Steve Maviglio, who was Davis’ spokesman during the blackouts. “When that doesn’t happen, leaders get blamed, whether they deserve it or not.”

By the time Arnold Schwarzenegger was chosen to replace Davis in October 2003, voters were also tired of partisan gridlock that led to budget delays and ready to elect a candidate who threatened to “blow up the boxes” in Sacramento and lower a vehicle license fee he called a “car tax.”

When Maviglio’s power went out Friday night, he said he had flashbacks to the 2001 crisis, but was also struck by the irony of yet another misfortune striking during an already calamitous year.

“This is just one more thing in 2020,” Maviglio said. “People are a little more conditioned now because they’ve been through so much this year, whereas in 2001 it came out of the blue. But I think patience is wearing thin.”

The blackouts represented the first time in almost 20 years that the California Independent System Operator, which runs the state’s power grid, declared a Stage 3 emergency alert.

About 120,000 customers of Pacific Gas and Electric, the state’s largest utility, lost power on Friday and Saturday nights.

Davis said communicating with the public about energy problems was one of the challenges he faced as governor. In 2001, he said he dealt with the intricacies of system deregulation and companies’ manipulation of the market.

“The whole business of keeping the lights on is more complex than most people think,” he said.

Ana Matosantos, Newsom’s cabinet secretary who leads the administration’s energy policy work, said the current grid problems are partly due to shifting energy demands during the pandemic. Energy consumption has been harder to predict since Newsom imposed a stay-at-home order to slow the spread of COVID-19, which shifted energy consumption to residential buildings and out of commercial ones.

“Unfortunately, it’s a confluence of situations that are creating a short-term perfect storm,” Matosantos said. “It’s not a fundamental break in our system as 2001 was. It is a temporary overload based on weather and shifting patterns due to COVID-19 affecting (the California Independent System Operator’s) ability to plan.”

Last fall, Newsom was a highly visible presence when PG&E imposed a series of deliberate blackouts in an effort to avoid sparking wildfires.

The governor blasted the utility’s management almost every day, saying the company had botched the blackouts — and still failed to prevent the Kincade Fire, which ripped through Sonoma County. He badgered PG&E into offering rebates to customers following the first outage, which the utility acknowledged it mishandled, and he raised the possibility of engineering a state takeover of the bankrupt company.

Later he made peace with PG&E, but only after prodding the company into accepting a series of financial and managerial reforms that enabled the utility to emerge intact from bankruptcy earlier this summer.

The governor doesn’t face re-election until 2022, and long-shot efforts to recall him haven’t reached critical mass.

But If the blackouts continue through the current week-long heatwave, or if the utility imposes so-called public safety power shutoffs again to prevent wildfires later this year, Newsom will need to be similarly aggressive, Maviglio said.

Weather forecasts gave advance warning about the current heatwave, and Maviglio said he was surprised he first heard Newsom mention it Friday, given the potential consequences and his experience last year with blackouts.

“If there were no lessons learned from last year, then it’s a giant political problem, but if they’ve been able to educate and manage situations better, then the governor’s able to say we did something,” Maviglio said. “He’s going to take responsibility. He’s going to be accountable. That’s what he needs to do.”

This story was originally published August 16, 2020 at 5:00 AM.