IDFR related:
President to meet with Gov. Davis
More News
05/23/2001
By SCOTT LINDLAW
The Mercury News
President Bush will meet next week in power-strapped California with Gov. Gray Davis,
a fierce critic of White House energy policy.
The Republican president and the Democratic governor are to meet Tuesday or
Wednesday, when Bush visits Camp Pendleton, the Fresno area and Los Angeles.
Details remain unresolved, spokesmen for both leaders said.
Davis has stepped up his criticism on Bush in recent days, suggesting during
interviews that the administration has ignored price-gouging by Texas-based electricity
generators because of Bush's ties to the energy industry.
Bush has avoided being drawn into a war of words. ``The president's focus is going to
be on solving problems. He's not interested in finger-pointing,'' White House
spokesman Ari Fleischer said Wednesday.
The governor has sought federal price limits on the electricity that generators sell to
California utilities. Bush has rejected the request because he says it would do nothing
to increase energy supplies or reduce demand.
California lawmakers sued Tuesday to force federal regulators to cap prices, which
have soared from $200 per megawatt hour in December to as much as $1,900 per
megawatt hour during peak times since then.
``There's a massive transfer of wealth going on from ordinary citizens in California to
Texas,'' Bush's home state, Davis said recently.
A Field Poll of California voters released Wednesday showed 70 percent of those
questioned said the federal government should cap wholesale electricity prices.
Just over half disapprove of the way both Davis and Bush have handled the state's
energy crisis, according to a survey this week by the Public Policy Institute of California.
The polls underlined the political stakes in the electricity crisis for both men, and each
was eager to claim Wednesday they had initiated the meeting.
Spokesmen for Davis said he had grown impatient waiting for an offer to sit down with
Bush, and on Wednesday he released a letter inviting Bush to meet ``any time during
your visit to our state.''
``I look forward to putting ideology aside and working together toward practical
solutions and an affordable, independent energy future,'' Davis
wrote.
A short time later, Fleischer told reporters that ``the president has invited Governor
Davis to meet with him, to get together, to talk about
issues important to California, including, of course, energy.''
Bush has visited more than half the states, but not California, the most populous, which
Democrat Al Gore won by 12 percentage points in the 2000 presidential election.
White House officials have not wanted to be pulled into the energy crisis there, fearing
that deeper involvement would lead voters to blame the administration if the situation
worsens.
Some of Bush's trip to California Tuesday and Wednesday is tailored to address the
energy crisis. He will visit the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton, near San Diego,
to remind state residents of his order that military facilities in the state cut peak-hour
usage by one-tenth.
``The federal government is going to be a strong partner to the state of California in the
cause of energy conservation to help ease the burden in
California as they go through the summer months, when demand is high and blackouts
are most at risk,'' Fleischer said. |
