The LA Times, in a devastating editorial this morning, takes apart Measure B, the Los Angeles ballot initiative (on next Tuesday's ballot) to promote solar energy. The paper all but calls the initiative a fraud, a disguised attempt by politicians and the union that represents Department of Water and Power leaders to seize power over solar power from an independent board and private industry. It's the kind of disingenuous measure that has come to define LA politics in this era.

I can't say it better than the Times editors said it, so here goes:

"The important parts are not in the ballot arguments or the campaign literature. Measure B, if passed, would transfer oversight of in-basin solar power from a five-member commission, with at least a modicum of political independence, to the City Council. But because the measure would allow the council to change or suspend everything that's in it, the council's new authority would not be accompanied by new accountability.

"On the contrary, this measure would give the council sweeping political cover. If it's in the council's interest to proceed with the plan, it can claim voters told them to do it. If it's in the council's interest to stop well short of the 400 megawatts the voters think they're getting, they can claim voters told them to do it.

"Meanwhile, instead of having guaranteed themselves 400 megawatts of in-basin solar power, voters, perhaps unwittingly, will have waded into the middle of an ongoing policy battle over whether private enterprise could make solar energy production more efficient by being allowed to sell or distribute excess energy. Measure B would eliminate much of the private role. In so doing, it would protect the city's utility and its union jobs, and that's not necessarily a bad thing -- but it's not what most voters believe they have been asked to decide.

"This is an extraordinarily bad way to make policy, and it is becoming typical of the way Los Angeles operates -- though Measure B breaks new ground in hiding the truth from the public. It's a City Hall measure presented as though it were a voter-sponsored initiative to demand that city leaders take some particular action. In fact, it's the city leaders who crafted this measure, supposedly to instruct themselves to do something, but in fact to get preemptive absolution from the electorate."