Sources and method

What these pages are

Every California city council's agendas, staff reports, budgets and minutes since 2022 are in this index. About 18,800 of them mention a community choice aggregator. From those, these pages gather the figures about money between a city government and a CCA — what a city paid to study or join one, lent it, got back, paid for its own electricity, received in grants, or lost when one failed — and put them next to the rate comparisons the CCAs and utilities publish.

How each figure was read

• Every dollar or percent figure within a few paragraphs of a CCA's name was found by a text scan.
• A language model sorted them (Claude Haiku 5.5), and the figures about money between the city and its CCA were read again with more of the surrounding text (Claude Sonnet 5.5 for loans, fees, transfers, exit costs and the city's own electricity; Claude Haiku 5.5 for grants). A figure is published only if the model's quote is found word for word in the document and contains the figure.
• For the case studies, the single-city CCAs and the studies councils were shown, people read the documents and copied each figure with its quote; each was checked again by code against the document's text.
• The same figure repeated in an agenda, a staff report and the minutes is shown once, at its earliest meeting.

Bills and exit fees

The bill comparisons are the joint rate comparisons each utility and CCA must publish for a typical residential customer, copied from the PDF on the utility's, the CCA's or the California Public Utilities Commission's website (each links to its source). The exit-fee (PCIA) tables come from the utilities' published tariffs and historical tables and from CCA rate sheets. CCA finances come from audited financial statements; give-backs, credit ratings and savings claims from the CCAs' own releases and filings. Membership dates come from the CCAs' and the CPUC's published lists.

Limits

• The council record starts in 2022 for most cities, so loans and decisions from the founding years (2010–2021) appear only when a later document recounts them.
• Staff estimates are estimates: a figure marked "estimate / proposal" was a projection or a request, not money spent.
• A comparison of bills is a snapshot for one typical household on one rate schedule; a CCA's own position changes when the utility's rates or the exit fee change.
• Savings totals the CCAs publish do not come with a method; they are shown as claims.
• The model can misread a table. Every figure links to its passage, and the city's original document is the official record.