What a turn of events. At the early June meeting, it looked like Jenine Windeshausen had convinced the board of the local Energy Co-Op Pioneer Energy to take a massive 17% rate increase.

She had packaged it as being 5% less than PG&E’s rates. Of course PG&E is the corrupt, scandal-marred utility that has some of the highest electricity rates in the entire country. Your intrepid blogger has seen articles in local publications that were promoting Jenine as some sort of visionary leader and Jenine herself appears to have been fantasizing about how to create all sorts of new government programs with the expected windfall.

Then the City of Rocklin and Greg Janda stepped in. Janda voted no in June. They then started educating the public about what was happening.

Then Supervisor Kirk Uhler and Jim Holmes (both absent from the June meeting) showed up and started asking questions. The proposed 17% Rate Increase and other smaller proposed rate increases were forestalled until August.

Then the wheels started coming off. Asked to provide data and documentation, the reports and calculations were done using simple math versus weighted averages. In simple terms, if Residential customers (2/3 of the usage) are getting a 20% rate increase and commercial customers are getting a 15% rate increase (1/3) – that is not a 17% overall rate increase. Secondly, tying rates to those of another utility (PG&E) is volitile.

Simple inquiries caused the presentations to break down. Enter the Auburn Journal

Voting in favor of an option that gives residential customers a 17 percent discount to Pacific Gas & Electric rates and a 2 percent overall increase were Placer County Supervisor Kirk Uhler, Colfax City Councilman Kim Douglass, Rocklin City Councilman Greg Janda and Lincoln City Councilman Peter Gilbert. Voting against the motion were Auburn Mayor Cheryl Maki and Loomis Town Councilman Jeff Duncan. Placer County Supervisor Jim Holmes was at the meeting for the first 1 3/4 hours but left well before the vote, saying he had another meeting to attend.

At the August meeting, under the pressure of being asked questions – Jenine Windeshausen brought back three proposals, 1 was inexplicably re-posing the 17% rate increase. 2 Was an 8% increase. 3. The proposal that was adopted. BTW – the Journal got it wrong, most residential customers will get a slight decrease in their rates.

Jenine, under questioning had to admit that the third proposal would still leave the utility with enough money to pay all of its’ bills and be able to pay down its’ debts significantly. The debt paydown was one of the primary reasons she was suggesting the massive 17% rate hike.

Pioneer Energy uses weighted voting. This means that the representative’s votes county by the number of users in their area. Kirk Uhler, representing the county got 100,000 votes. Greg Janda, representing Rocklin, got 60,000 votes (forgive rounding and simplification) – this means that when Kirk moved adoption of plan 3 and Janda Seconded it… that was the ballgame.

Then Jenine quit as CEO of Pioneer Energy the next day. This leads your intrepid blogger to believe that it was all about her and not the best interests of the ratepayers and the utility itself. The resignation was obviously sent to the Auburn Journal and others in an attempt to curry sympathy.

Rather than negotiate and attempt to build a consensus, this is what happened.

Jenine is the Treasurer Tax-Collector of the County of Placer. It appears that we need to recruit an opponent for her as she has been in office 25 years and appears to have been affected adversely by that extremely long tenure in the bowels of government.