Shall the City create an Office of the Independent Ratepayer Advocate to make recommendations about utility rates to the City’s Public Utilities Commission?

The PUC is the most powerful commission in the City in terms of budget and the projects they allocate. The PUC gets audited once every five years to determine if any changes need to be made in cases were the ratepayer (e.g. us) gets screwed.

Proposition I proposes there be a auditor that does these reviews on a daily basis. In summary from the legal text, “The Office of the Independent Ratepayer Advocate shall evaluate, analyze, provide comments and make recommendations on the efficiency, equity, and fiscal feasibility of utility rate proposals prepared by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission under Charter section 8B.125, independent of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and from the ratepayers’ perspective.”

Here is analogous example–say you put in $10,000 in a savings account accruing 10% interest annually. In ten years, you would have $25,937.42 in the bank. Now, instead, we compound it daily for a total of $27,179.10 in ten years. A difference of $1,241.68.

So, if you have someone there every day making sure the PUC’s plans are up to snuff then the taxpayers will save quite a lot of money taking into consideration that the budget for PUC is in the hundreds of millions and the example I just showed was just $10,000.

Vote Yes on Proposition I.