More than 1,500 IBEW members who work for San Diego Gas and Electric are claiming victory — and breathing a little easier — after the San Diego City Council unanimously voted in June to squash a citizens' initiative to force the municipal government to take over operation of the utility's operations within the city's limits.

"This was Union Busting 101," said Nate Fairman, business manager of San Diego Local 465, which has represented SDG&E workers for more than 100 years.

If the municipalization effort had been successful, he said, it would have put hundreds of IBEW jobs at risk, jeopardized the pay and benefits of those left behind, and harmed the local's bargaining power.

"The takeover would have gutted our century-old contract with SDG&E and hurt my members' ability to provide for their families," Fairman said. "It was just reckless."

The defeat of the Power San Diego municipalization campaign was largely thanks to the work of Local 465 and other members of Responsible Energy San Diego, an alliance of labor unions, economic organizations and businesses.

What also helped was the work IBEW members across San Diego put in over the last 10 years to help elect a solid pro-worker majority to the City Council, a body that for too long had an anti-worker track record.

"Our activism won out," Fairman said. "Our members showed up to every meeting [about municipalization] with the mayor and City Council, and we fought hard to ensure that the frontline workers' concerns were front and center."

Conversations surrounding SDG&E's municipalization began in earnest several years ago when the City Council was in negotiations with the utility to renew its franchise agreement.

"The biggest misconception was that the city takeover would lead to lower rates, but it's not that simple," Fairman said.

One study found that buying SDG&E to municipalize it could cost San Diegans as much as $9.3 billion in bond-backed startup and purchasing costs, $3.9 billion in lost revenue from property taxes and franchise fees, and as much as $400 million in annual interest payments.

"This debt would be 100% funded through our electric bills and would mean higher costs for all of us," Fairman said.

Far more worrying, he said, was how the IBEW would fit into a municipalization picture. "The city taking over SDG&E would have destroyed our union contract," Fairman said.

PSD's backers claimed that their proposal included protections for IBEW-represented workers. "There was only one sentence mentioning union labor," Fairman noted. When the PSD plan was drafted, he said, "they didn't reach out to us."

When PSD launched a full-blown effort last fall to force the government takeover plan onto the November 2024 election ballot, Local 465 and the rest of RESD were ready to spend the next months building support for their side.

"Coalition building and solidarity in the San Diego labor movement were crucial," Fairman said. "Bob Dean at [Vacaville, Calif.] Local 1245 also helped us tremendously; they've been fighting similar efforts up in San Francisco."

SDG&E backed the IBEW's efforts as well, something Fairman credits to the union's Code of Excellence program. "Working together, we spent a year developing the Code," he said. "Now we have Code stickers on all the trucks. Our partnership within the framework of the Code was crucial to delivering this victory."

The first big win came in April when the council's Rules Committee reviewed proposed measures for November's ballot. Dozens of IBEW members and their allies were on hand at the hearing, many wearing hardhats and carrying signs, to register their opposition. "We mobilized dozens of members to go to meetings to make our voices heard," Fairman said.

After the Rules Committee voted against allowing the ballot measure to proceed, PSD tried launching a petition campaign to get the issue onto the ballot. The drive netted a fraction of the required number of valid signatures, but enough were collected to require the full City Council to consider the ballot question again.

At the council's June meeting, a force of IBEW members was present again to testify against the proposal. "That vote was the biggest showdown," Fairman said.

The council voted unanimously to reject the measure. "The frontline union workers' voices carried the day," Fairman said. "We got a crucial win by clearly laying out the risks to utility workers and to the city."

The victory in San Diego was the latest among similar IBEW accomplishments. Last year, members of Manchester, Maine, Local 1837 led a successful statewide fight against a referendum that proposed allowing the state government to buy Central Maine Power and Versant Power, and the members of El Paso, Texas, Local 960 worked to defeat a ballot measure that could have led to a city takeover of El Paso Electric. Both plans also would have jeopardized hundreds of IBEW jobs.

Fairman said the San Diego municipalization plan may not be dead. "We now have a strong group of member activists ready to take on anything thrown our way," he said. "If this or any other attack comes up again, we'll be ready for it."

Ninth District International Vice President Dave Reaves appreciated Local 465's work. "Thanks to our members' strong relationships with city leaders and our partnership with SDG&E, we were able to count on them to stick with us to help put down this expensive and ill-conceived attack on working people," Reaves said.

When the developers of the first fully electric tugboat in the United States were looking to plug it in somewhere in the Port of San Diego, they turned to the charging station experts with San Diego Local 569 to build the first of what's hoped will be many such shoreside stations.

"Local 569 is proud to be the workforce at the port that's laying the electrical groundwork for the eWolf tugboat," said Business Manager Jeremy Abrams. "It's all work that we already know how to do."

This past spring, as many as 10 members of Local 569, working for IBEW signatory contractor Baker Electric, could be found installing a state-of-the-art microgrid and related shoreside power infrastructure at Crosby Pier, at the northern end of the 10th Avenue Marine Terminal and not far from the Coronado Bridge.

"One thing I was excited about with this project was how the IBEW was leading the way on it," Abrams said.

The new charging station, designed to draw power from the local grid during off-peak hours, was built in consultation with Crowley Marine Services, the shipping and logistics company that was awarded federal and state grants worth $18 million toward the design and construction of the eWolf and its charging station.

At Crosby Pier, Local 569's electricians installed a 40-kw solar cell canopy that supplements the shoreside microgrid's power needs while providing shade for cabinet banks containing the charging station's 500-kw batteries. Workers also replaced the site's 750-kilovolt-ampere utility service transformer with a 1,500-kVA model, and they put in new switch gear, electrical conduits and cables, 10 AC/DC converter cubicles and isolation transformers.

Union access to projects like this one in the greater San Diego area has gotten easier in recent years, thanks in large part to the determined efforts of Local 569 members and the other building trades unions — first by working to get majorities of labor-friendly City Council members elected in San Diego and neighboring Chula Vista, and then by lobbying those leaders to overturn their cities' bans on project labor agreements and enact new PLAs. (Learn more in the April edition of The Electrical Worker.)

"From the San Diego shores of the Pacific to the deserts of Imperial Valley," Abrams said, "Local 569 stands with communities impacted by decades of dirty industry to decrease air pollution and increase community health."

For years, conventional harbor craft like tugboats have represented about half of all maritime-related pollutant emissions as they go about helping barges and oceangoing vessels navigate harbors and maneuver in and out of berths. A typical diesel-power tug can burn 30,000 gallons of fuel per year.

The eWolf's batteries are powerful enough to let it complete two typical jobs at full power before needing a recharge. Over 10 years of service, the e-tug is expected to do work that ordinarily would produce, from a conventional tug, 178 tons of nitrogen oxide, 2.5 tons of diesel particulate matter and 3,100 tons of carbon dioxide.

"We know the positive impact that transitioning from dirty fuel to clean electricity will make on those communities adjacent to California's fourth largest port," Abrams said.

The shoreside charging station now in place is the first of what is hoped will be many more such stations — not just in San Diego but across North America — helping the IBEW gain steady construction and maintenance work in the expanding port and boat electrification industry.

Meanwhile, Crowley is developing several more eWolf sister tugboats. Thanks to the Port of San Diego project, Abrams said, the IBEW now has a leg up on capturing work building the shoreside charging stations for those e-tugs, too.

"Our partnership with the port is exemplary of Local 569's decades-long commitment to being at the forefront of California's transition to a green, clean energy economy," the business manager said, "from being among the first in the nation to develop a training program in solar technologies in 1999, to ensuring each of our members receives Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Training Program certification."

The nonprofit EVITP was developed in a collaboration that included the IBEW alongside automotive, utility and manufacturing industry partners.

"Climate-friendly projects like this one, which helps the industry rethink the way tugboats are powered, are something that the IBEW can get enthusiastically behind," said Ninth District International Vice President Dave Reaves, whose jurisdiction includes California. "The highly trained and highly skilled members of the IBEW will have a clear advantage in guiding this new industry along, giving our union another great opportunity to showcase what our members can do while helping locals increase their market share."