Leaders will discuss three charter amendments that could be added to the November ballot: A consolidation of the city's utilities, aligning election cycles permanently with the state, and changing the way the police oversight is conducted in the city.
Long Beach officials say that merging the water and sewer services with the gas department could create a more efficient service for residents and ratepayers.
Officials also made the case Thursday for the City Council to consider a charter amendment to move the gas utility out of the Energy Resources department and into the Water Department’s jurisdiction.
Mesa is urging residents to conserve electricity as prices soar and energy reserves are diminishing.
The city of Mesa operates its own electric utility that serves about 18,000 residential, commercial and light industrial customers in the downtown area.
Frank McRae is the city’s director of the Energy Resources Department. He said the power supply markets are tightening to a point they had projected wouldn’t happen until 2023. There’s typically an amount of supply that exceeds demand amongst the utilities and the power providers in the western regional markets, he said. That margin, or what we call reserve margin, has diminished significantly over the last several years. So as a result, energy prices have spiked.
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Chris Garner, the general manager of the Long Beach Water Department and Bob Dowel, the city’s director of Energy Resources, which oversees consumer natural gas delivery, sent a memo to city officials last month expressing interest in taking another look at consolidation.
The purpose of consolidation would be to create a single business entity under one governing body that would have utility-focused governance to help set policy and rates, the memo said. Currently, Garner is hired by and reports to the Board of Water Commissioners, while Dowell reports to the city manager.
A ballot measure that would have created a Utilities Commission to oversee both water and energy was presented in 2018 before the City Council and the Charter Amendment Committee, which voted to abandon it in August of that year by opting to leave it off that year’s November ballot.