If the system we have cannot deliver that without catastrophic wildfires and shifting the losses onto California families, preserving it should not be our goal.
Page B2From§Eachthe midnight edition — 1 September 2026
California kills its utility bailout the same week San Francisco guts $500 million in homelessness contracts.
As it ran on the front
Died this week, in California and in San Francisco, within days of each other: the utility bailout, and the blank check.
The utility bailout was young as these things go, cooked up to shield a power company from the cost of its own infrastructure, and it did not survive contact with the people of California, who apparently still get a vote in these matters now and then. It is survived by the ratepayers who fought it, and by every other utility watching to see if the trick still works elsewhere.…
…(cont) The blank check — five hundred million dollars of it, running through San Francisco's homelessness contracts for years without much of anybody checking the math — did not go quietly either. It is being overhauled, which in city-hall language means somebody finally asked the nonprofits holding those contracts to show their work. It is survived by a sweeping clampdown, several very uncomfortable meetings, and a paper trail that apparently existed the whole time.
Neither of these programs was killed by an outside enemy. Both died the same way most bunk dies eventually — somebody looked at the number long enough that it stopped being an abstraction and started being a bill with a name on it. That's not a scandal. That's what happens when the light finally gets turned on in a room that's been dark a good while.
Preceded in death, in both cases, by the assumption that nobody was going to check.
The whippersnappers running the numbers this time didn't invent anything new — they just did the arithmetic that was always available to do. Turns out that's enough, most of the time, to kill a bad program. You don't need a scandal. You just need somebody with a calculator and the patience to sit through the hearing.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that whoever inherits these contracts next — the power company, the nonprofits, whoever's up next in line for the check — publish the number before the check clears, not after.
“Two blank checks got torn up in one week, one for the power company, one for the nonprofits running homelessness contracts, and both only got torn up after the money was already spent for years. That's not reform, that's the invoice finally showing up. Somebody was cashing those checks the whole time nobody was watching.”
“The bailout wasn't a bailout — it was a rate stabilization mechanism, fully justified by legacy infrastructure costs, and killing it just shifts those costs onto ordinary ratepayers, which is — actually that's kind of the point of the criticism, isn't it. Same with the city contracts, those nonprofits were providing essential services, they just — needed better oversight, sure, but that's not the same as the money being wasted.”
The receipts
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie is launching a reset of the city’s costly homelessness response system — promising no more blank checks for organizations receiving public funds in a statement released Monday. The Department of…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.