100 Gregory Lane, Pleasant Hill, CA 94523-3323 – (925) 671-5270 www.pleasanthillca.org
March __, 2026
Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, Chair
Assembly Committee on Utilities and Energy
1020 N Street, Room 408A
Sacramento, CA 95814
Re: Letter of Support for Assembly Bill 1761 (Rogers)
Dear Chair Petrie-Norris:
On behalf of the City Council of the City of Pleasant Hill, I write to support AB 1761 proposed by Assemblymember Chris Rogers (D-Santa Rosa). The bill supports energy affordability through improved transparency and certainty around the calculation of the Power Charge Indifference Adjustment (PCIA), a charge found on nearly all energy bills. As a member of MCE, California’s first Community Choice Aggregator (CCA), the city of Pleasant Hill, its families, and its businesses can face significant bill increases – not necessarily because of increased energy consumption, but because of how the PCIA is calculated.
Electricity bills in California are on the rise, in part due to challenging market conditions and outdated and inefficient regulatory policies. Customers across Pleasant Hill are feeling the impact.
California needs practical, consumer-focused solutions that ensure customers are not overcharged.
Increasing transparency on how the PCIA is calculated will help keep this charge fair and accurate.
The PCIA is a fee intended to ensure customers who leave utility generation service, like CCA customers, pay their fair share of legacy power costs. It is calculated every year in proceedings at the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). However, since the PCIA was instituted, there has been no consistent standard for what data must be made available to parties participating in the rate proceedings that set the PCIA – even to CCAs whose customers it impacts.
Without adequate transparency, CCAs and consumer advocates are unable to verify the accuracy of the PCIA charges that their customers must pay and cannot confidently forecast rates – both of which protect customers in the city of Pleasant Hill from unexpected rate increases. AB 1761 addresses these problems by requiring that the CPUC and IOUs disclose all data used to calculate PCIA costs, including cost inputs, forecasting assumptions, and methodologies. The bill ensures that parties proposing in a proceeding to change the PCIA provide all the data that informs their proposal. Sensitive information would remain protected through Commission-approved nondisclosure agreements – a practice already used to protect sensitive information in other compliance areas.
Greater transparency allows advocates and CCAs, like Marin Clean Energy, to better advocate for their customers and assess proposals that would change the PCIA. It also can inform cost forecasts and enable CCAs to mitigate the effects of sudden rate swings on Pleasant Hill customers. It improves accuracy and regulatory efficiency, which helps all customers save money.
For these reasons, the city of Pleasant Hill strongly supports AB 1761, an important energy affordability tool, which will only strengthen confidence that customers pay their fair share – and not more. If you have any questions, please contact me at [email protected], or the city’s board representative to MCE, Councilmember Amanda Szakats at [email protected].
Sincerely,
Zac Shess, Mayor
Andrei Obolenskiy, Vice Mayor
Bella La, Sue Noack, Amanda Szakats, Councilmembers
City of Pleasant Hill
cc. Sen. Tim Grayson
Assemblymember Anamarie Avila – Farias
Samantha Brightman, East Bay Division of the League of Cities