Capdiamont’s Weblog

Loophole in deal with Schwarzenegger delays sharing gaming profits

By NANCY VOGEL
LOS ANGELES TIMES

Published: Sunday, June 22, 2008 at 4:30 a.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, June 22, 2008 at 6:37 a.m.

SACRAMENTO — Exploiting a loophole in a deal struck with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a San Diego County American Indian tribe has avoided paying the cash-strapped state $30 million in gambling profits.

Voters in February allowed four tribes to expand their casino operations in exchange for a larger share of their revenues. Three of the tribes must make the payments their compacts demand by the end of next month, but the Schwarzenegger administration last week said the Sycuan band of the Kumeyaay Nation could wait until next year to start payments.

That permission came four days after the Sycuan gave $45,000 to the campaign for a November redistricting initiative promoted by Schwarzenegger.

Sycuan spokesman Adam Day called the timing of the donation “a total coincidence.”

A Schwarzenegger spokeswoman also denied any connection between the $45,000 and the agreement.

“It’s not a donation that the governor solicited,” said Julie Soderlund. “Regardless, the governor doesn’t make decisions about policy based on anything other than what he feels is best for the state of California.”

Excusing the Sycuan will cost the state $30 million, according to H.D. Palmer, spokesman for the California Department of Finance.

Some opponents of the Schwarzenegger deals are saying, “I told you so.”

Doug Elmets, who represents gambling tribes that fought the others’ expansion, faults the Sycuan for not living up to its compact and the governor for not holding them to it. The two parties cut a side deal, he said, beyond what voters approved.

“It doesn’t look good, because clearly the governor and the tribes made it appear as if this was going to be real money,” said Elmets. “And now it looks like it’s phony.”

The Sycuan invoked a clause in its compact with Schwarzenegger, struck in August 2006, saying the tribal council had to approve the accord by Dec. 15, 2006. Otherwise, the governor could void the agreement.

The tribal council did not meet its deadline. But the governor declined to scrap the deal, agreeing instead to the delay.

Schwarzenegger’s legal affairs secretary, Andrea Lynn Hoch, said the postponement of payments was justified because the compact is good for the state and the tribe.

Day said the tribe wanted to plan its casino expansion before enacting the terms of the new agreement.

The Sycuan, like other tribes, has made payments to state-administered funds set up to help tribes without casinos and to help local governments cope with increased traffic and other casino side effects.

Under their agreements with Schwarzenegger, some of the four tribes’ money will go to the state budget.

The Sycuan now have until January to ratify the compact. Once the pact takes effect, the tribe must make payments quarterly. The compact calls for $20 million a year from the tribe plus 15 percent of the revenue from any slot machines it adds.

Of the four accords that were at stake in February, only one besides Sycuan’s — that of the Morongo Band of Mission Indians — required tribal council approval. The Morongo tribe ratified its deal in November 2006, long before the Legislature, U.S. Department of Interior and voters statewide gave approval.

The tribes with new deals — the Sycuan, the Morongo, the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians and the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians — spent $83 million campaigning for their casino expansions.

Their main claim was that the deals would generate billions of dollars for state coffers over the next 20 years.

During the campaign, Schwarzenegger appeared in television ads touting the financial benefits of the accords for taxpayers.

Opponents contended that the agreements would unleash one of the biggest gambling expansions in U.S. history and leave it up to the tribes to calculate California’s share of slot machine revenue.

Palmer said he expects the state to get $527 million from the new deals through June 2009.

Or how the fair is forced to be smaller.

To understand what normally happens is The Calvary Chapel Eureka Church meets at the Ben Wilson chicken barn every Sunday. Except during the Annual fair, then the Church stuff’s all it’s belongings in to it’s trailer behind the building.

The Ben Wilson chicken barn got it’s name from a great man, who was a poultry enthusiast and judge. This wide open building holds chickens, ducks, geese, and rabbits. This is for both youth and adults.

Not this year. The Church built two offices, refuses to tear them down, dismantle them, or allow access to them. This means several things, exhibit space has been reduced, access to the breaker box in the building has been eliminated, and the public has been restricted from use of it’s own building.

This building has never been intended as a Church. The public should not be restricted from it’s use.

By JEFF KAROUB, AP Business Writer 2 hours, 46 minutes ago

DETROIT - Dale Fortin is getting a new kind of customer at his Detroit auto repair shop, customers who have not just been in a fender-bender or had a windshield smashed by a rock.

The soaring price of crude oil has turned gas tanks into a cache of valuable booty, and Fortin has replaced several tanks punctured or drilled by thieves thirsting for the nearly $4-a-gallon fuel inside.

“That’s the new fad,” said the co-owner of Dearborn Auto Tech in Detroit. “I’d never seen it before gas got up this high.”

While gas station drive-offs and siphoning are far more common methods of stealing gas, reports of tank and line puncturing are starting to trickle into police departments and repair shops across the country.

Some veteran mechanics and law enforcement officers say it’s an unwelcome return of a crime they first saw during the Middle East oil embargo of the early 1970s.

Gasoline prices surged just before the long Memorial Day holiday weekend and crept a hair higher overnight Monday to a new record national average $3.937 for a gallon of regular, according to a survey of stations by AAA and the Oil Price Information Service.

Given their height, Fortin said pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles are more vulnerable to the thieves who puncture the tanks and use a container to catch the fuel.

Plastic tanks are typically the target, he said, since there is less chance of a catastrophic spark, and they are easier to drill into.

A design change may also be contributing to the preference for a drill rather than a syphoning hose. The tanks in many vehicles now have check balls, which prevent spills in a rollover accident. They also make siphoning more difficult.

In recent weeks, police in Denver arrested two suspects in connection with about a dozen cases of damaging tanks and stealing gas.

Denver Police Det. John White sees this “new way of siphoning gas” as a bigger problem.

“What made this particular method so dangerous and concerning for us was the way in which they were doing it — using cordless drills to puncture holes in these tanks,” he said of the rash of cases his department has investigated this spring. “The heat, friction generated could have easily sparked a fire. It just made for a dangerous situation for the suspects and the community.”

Tank puncturing has yet to reach the radar screens of law enforcement organizations such as the National Sheriffs’ Association, or the Automotive Service Association, a group that represents independent garage operators.

Still, at least one insurance company has taken notice: AAA Mid-Atlantic issued a press release earlier this month that cited a case in April in Bethesda, Md., involving a thief who broke the fuel line underneath a car and sapped five gallons of gas. Montgomery County police said a bus in the same parking lot had 30 gallons of diesel stolen.

“These are crimes of opportunity,” said AAA spokeswoman Catherine Rossi. “Right now, some people think that stealing gas is a way to get rich quick. It becomes a question of whether you’re leaving yourself open to the possibility that someone can get to your car without being seen.”

The cost of replacing a metal tank on passenger vehicles is between $300 and $400, and the plastic tank common on newer vehicles would be at least $500.

Bruce Burnham said thieves have hit the Budget Truck Rental business he owns in Shreveport, La., about a half-dozen times in the past three years. The thefts started shortly after Hurricane Katrina when prices spiked, then stopped for a while, then restarted about a year ago.

In some cases the gas lines have been cut; in others, gas has been pumped out. He figures he’s lost at least a few thousand dollars in stolen fuel, repair costs and loss of rental fees.

Burnham said he has taken “extra measures to protect the vehicles,” but declined to elaborate.

Gas and diesel aren’t the only fuels being plundered. Restaurants from Berkeley, Calif., to Sedgwick, Kan., are reporting thefts of old cooking oil worth thousands of dollars. Cooking oil rustlers refine it into barrels of biofuel in backyard stills. Biodiesel can also be blended with petroleum diesel, and blends of the alternative fuel are now sold at 1,400 gas stations across the country.

Still, the theft of regular unleaded gasoline — the kind that leaves everyday drivers high and dry — is on the minds of more law enforcement agencies as prices rise.

Troy Police Lt. Gerry Scherlinck said his suburban Detroit department this month received a report of a stored motor home whose tank was siphoned and drained of 50 gallons of gas. They also had several incidents last year in industrial parks where the gas tanks of vehicles were punctured.

“Gas is liquid gold these days, and has been for the last year-and-a-half,” Scherlinck said. “I would anticipate seeing more of these kinds of incidents as the price continues to go up.”

Two faults here, one to use a visitor;s suitcase, two the dogs didn’t pick it up. What happens to the person going though the customs of the world with the now smelly luggage?

TOKYO (Reuters) - One of the travelers who arrived at Tokyo’s Narita airport over the weekend may have picked up an unusual souvenir from customs — a package of cannabis.

A customs official hid the package in a suitcase belonging to a passenger arriving from Hong Kong as a training exercise for sniffer dogs Sunday, but lost track of both drugs and suitcase during the practice session, a spokeswoman for Tokyo customs said.

Customs regulations specify that a training suitcase be used for such exercises, but the official said he had used passengers’ suitcases for similar purposes in the past, domestic media reported.

“The dogs have always been able to find it before,” NHK quoted him as saying. “I became overconfident that it would work.”

Anyone who finds the package should contact Tokyo customs as soon as possible, the spokeswoman said.

(Reporting by Isabel Reynolds; editing by Sophie Hardach)

Barely entered the hot season, and already worries about energy.

PG&E officials are asking customers to cut energy use this week as hot temperatures throughout the state strain energy sources.

The power company has implemented a “critical peak pricing” period Thursday to encourage customers to cut use during the predicted hottest point of the heat spell.

Temperatures are climbing today and expected to soar above 100 degrees in the Bay Area and Central Valley Thursday. PG&E is asking customers to reduce usage of appliances and keep air conditioning thermostats no lower than 78 degrees, unless health considerations are present.

Between noon and 6 p.m. Thursday PG&E will implement peak pricing, which effects those who have signed up for the energy conservation program. Through PG&E’s Critical Peak Pricing Program, business customers receive lower rates during the summer season in exchange for a higher rate during designated critical peak day hours, said Jana Morris, spokeswoman for PG&E. The power company can institute the high pricing program only 12 times a year. Thursday is the first day this year it will be used.

Well we saved the horses from slaughter, it is much more nicer for them to be shot, or for them to starve to death on their own. Sad.

By Laura Zuckerman Mon May 12, 8:15 PM ET

SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - In the classic Hollywood western, a cowboy portrayed by John Wayne gallops across the sagebrush steppe and rocky ridges of the American West with only his horse for a companion.

What the films don’t show is the cowboy buying and hauling hay for his horse, or what happens to the horse when it is too aged, infirm or irascible to ride.

Those more mundane details are at the heart of a debate about growing cases of mistreatment of horses in the United States, at a time when hay and grain prices are skyrocketing and when options for disposing of unwanted horses are dwindling.

Just a year ago, the sale of an average horse suitable for recreation — one with neither prized bloodlines nor a performance record to heighten its status — would have fetched several thousand dollars.

Today, prices in some cases have dropped to just hundreds of dollars, largely because of higher costs for their maintenance and transport.

The situation for marginal horses — horses whose poor physical condition or disposition makes them targets for slaughter — is even worse, after a court ruling sought by animal-rights groups effectively shut down the U.S. horse slaughter industry last year.

The result is that a growing number of unwanted horses are being starved or turned loose to fend for themselves in the U.S. West, according to animal welfare advocates.

“What concerns me is a fate worse than slaughter,” said Temple Grandin, professor of animal science at Colorado State University and an authority on the handling of livestock such as horses. “We’ve got people turning horses loose in fields, dropping horses off in the night — my worst nightmares are coming true.”

Such images have strong resonance in the West, the land of the rider on the range immortalized in art by Frederic Remington and in popular culture by actors such as the late President Ronald Reagan.

Far from Kentucky, where thoroughbreds race the Churchill Downs, owning a horse in the West is a middle-class occupation. The average horse owner rides for recreation and keeps their horse on their own land or land rented for the purpose, rather than at a commercially run barn.

Horses eat hay made from either grass or alfalfa, or a mix of both, and a modest amount of grain. Prices fluctuate, but in east central Idaho, hay prices have risen to $145 from $120 per ton a year ago, a jump of 21 percent. In northern Idaho it costs $220 per ton and as much as $300 per ton in parts of California. Feeding a horse can cost $2,000 a year or more.

TURNED LOOSE

The West is also the region where the historic practice of releasing domesticated horses into the wild — first by Spanish explorers and last by ranchers — gave rise to the herds of Mustangs, or feral horses, that still inhabit the vast public lands of Western states.

But the romantic concept of freeing a tamed horse to roam the West’s wide open spaces bears no resemblance to the reality, said Kirk Miller, livestock investigator in Idaho and Montana for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“They have no survival instinct in the wild, no clue as to what’s dangerous to eat, no knowledge of how to grub for food under the snow,” he said.

Miller and Colorado State’s Grandin are among animal experts who say the campaign led by the Humane Society of the United States to end domestic horse slaughter was well-intentioned but misguided.

Now the tens of thousands of American horses marked for slaughter are shipped to Canada and Mexico, where long, stressful journeys end in what some horse advocates say can be unduly painful deaths.

Most horses are slaughtered for human consumption, with Europe and Asia providing markets for their meat.

Some horse associations are siding with the Humane Society in its fight to end export of horses for slaughter altogether. But others are seeking to re-establish processing in the United States to broaden the outlet for unwanted horses and to ensure the animals are killed by a mechanical method approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Keith Dane, director of equine protection for the Humane Society, said for Americans to have their horses killed for their meat would be akin to sending their pet dogs to slaughter for human consumption.

But unlike its canine counterpart, a horse weighs an average of 1,000 pounds and disposal of its carcass after Humane Society-recommended euthanasia has become burdensome. Where permitted by law and where able, owners can bury carcasses on their own land or pay several hundred dollars in assorted fees to deposit the remains at a local landfill.

Those complications may be behind what state livestock officials and federal land managers in the West say is a spike in the number of horses shot dead and dumped on public lands.

Scot Dutcher, animal protection chief with the Colorado Department of Agriculture, said the abandoned horse cases officials are addressing now is a ripple compared to the wave that may come.

“If it becomes illegal to export horses for slaughter, we’ll be dealing with an equine tsunami,” he said.

Meanwhile, officials at some sale barns in Montana are asking owners of especially old or underweight horses to pay the auction house if the animals do not bring a sufficient price.

And horse rescues, nonprofit groups that rehabilitate and place unwanted and often abused horses, are reporting a rise in the number of calls they are fielding and the number of horses they turn away for lack of resources.

“I could have 500 horses here tomorrow,” said Brent Glover, head of Orphan Acres, an Idaho rescue operation that can maintain a maximum of 130 horses.

(Reporting by Laura Zuckerman; Editing by Eddie Evans)

Seems the high metal prices, are doing what the peace protesters couldn’t, stopping the military.

By CHELSEA J. CARTER, Associated Press Writer Tue May 13, 1:31 PM ET

TWENTYNINE PALMS, Calif. - Hundreds of Marines were conducting a combat training mission in the Mojave Desert when an air patrol spotted something kicking up dust: A civilian pickup truck speeding across the barren landscape.

Behind the wheel was a suspected scrap metal thief who had been combing the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center for spent brass shell casings. His intrusion onto the base was the 12th time in six months that scavengers had inadvertently halted combat exercises.

Bombing ranges have become prime hunting grounds for so-called “scrappers,” who are motivated by soaring commodity prices to take greater risks in their quest for brass, copper and aluminum. The scavenging causes headaches for the military, which cannot patrol every inch of the remote bases where spent ammunition, shrapnel and unexploded ordnance are easy to find.

“This is not just some petty crime. This is dangerous business,” said Andy Chatelin, director of range management at Twentynine Palms, which at 932 square miles is the world’s largest Marine Corps base.

Illegal scavenging of military munitions has long been an issue at military bases. But as metal prices have climbed in the past two years, scavengers have become more numerous, more audacious and more sophisticated.

After he was spotted by troops last December, the pickup truck driver barreled directly at a Marine, who fired five shots at the vehicle. The driver swerved, flipped over and spilled hundreds of dollars in collected metal. He was taken by helicopter to a hospital and later charged with attempted murder.

The military loses hundreds of thousands of dollars every time it is forced to halt training. And when scrappers make off with unexploded ordnance, the public is at risk.

The Pentagon estimates up to 10 percent of all ordnance such as bombs, missiles and grenades fails to explode on impact. Some of it is left behind in training areas.

In May 2007, two suspected scrappers removed a Vietnam-era missile from the Twentynine Palms base. It later exploded in their Barstow home, killing both men and destroying the apartment. Earlier this year, two workers were injured at a Raleigh, N.C., recycling plant when ordnance suspected of coming from nearby Fort Bragg exploded.

“The expense we have to go through, not just to guard against the loss of training time, but the chance of this hazardous material getting out into the public, is enormous,” said Ronald Pearce, who oversees a training range in Yuma, Ariz., where the Marines and Navy practice aerial assaults. “You just can’t look the other way and condone it.”

No one knows how much scrap metal lies discarded on U.S. military bases because there are no records of the tonnage of exploded and unexploded ordnance. The number of illegal scavengers is also unclear because the military can only confirm a theft when there is an arrest.

After meeting with the Defense Department last month, the Institute of Scrap Recycling urged its members to stop accepting military scrap without knowing the source of the material. It also recommended the military create a system to account for the material it uses.

The Pentagon said it’s impossible to calculate the cost in interrupted training — including lost man-hours and wasted fuel — but they have begun tracking lost training time, which can climb into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

At the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma, officials estimated they lost nine hours of aerial training between January and March.

To catch thieves, bases are combining technology with foot patrols and relying on help from sheriff’s deputies.

The Twentynine Palms base is using cameras to conduct video surveillance of base borders. It also has assigned Marines from its Special Reaction Team, similar to a SWAT team, to work primarily on nabbing scrappers and trespassers.

But they are often up against a savvy enemy that uses high-tech communications and GPS systems, and often works in teams.

During a recent patrol at the base, Marines hunted for scrappers in gullies, desert washes and mountain crevices where some thieves had previously hid from helicopters under camouflage netting.

Last year, Marines found an abandoned car in the desert and a dead man nearby, plus a second man who was on the brink of death from dehydration. The pair were believed to have been prowling for scrap metal. Similar deaths were reported in Yuma.

The military said most scrappers arrested in the past several years appeared to be either illegal immigrants or drug users looking for easy money. If convicted on federal charges ranging from trespassing to theft, they face up to 20 years in prison.

Because the Twentynine Palms base is so vast, officials cannot erect and maintain fences. Instead, they have posted signs warning against trespassing, only to see those signs stolen for the metal.

“We’ve seen all types,” Sgt. Timothy Warren said as he scanned the mountains with binoculars, looking for scavengers. “We’ve even arrested one guy, sent him to jail and then arrested him again a few days before he’s even gone to court.”

One of those ever increasing unintended consequences.

By JOHN K. WILEY, Associated Press Writer Mon May 12, 6:30 PM ET

REARDAN, Wash. - Mom-and-pop service stations are running into a problem as gasoline marches toward $4 a gallon: Thousands of old-fashioned pumps can’t register more than $3.99 on their spinning mechanical dials.

The pumps, throwbacks to a bygone era on the American road, are difficult and expensive to upgrade, and replacing them is often out of the question for station owners who are still just scraping by.

Many of the same pumps can only count up to $99.99 for the total sale, preventing owners of some SUVs, vans, trucks and tractor-trailers to fill their tanks all the way.

As many as 8,500 of the nation’s 170,000 service stations have old-style meters that need to be fixed — about 17,000 individual pumps, said Bob Renkes, executive vice president of the Petroleum Equipment Institute of Tulsa, Okla.

At Chip Colville’s Chevron station in this eastern Washington town, where men in the family have pumped gas since 1919, three stubby, gray pumps were installed when gas was less than $1 a gallon. They top out at $3.999, only 30 cents above the price of regular gas at Colville’s station.

“In small towns, where you don’t have the volume, there’s no way you can afford to pay for the replacements for these old pumps,” Colville said. “It’s just not economically feasible.”

The problem is worse in extremely rural areas, where “this might be the only pump in town that people can access,” said Mike Rud, director of the North Dakota Petroleum Marketers Association.

Demand for replacements has caused a months-long backlog for companies that make or rebuild the mechanical meters — and that’s just for stations that can afford the upgrade.

For many station owners — who, because of relatively small profit margin on gas, aren’t raking in money even though gas prices are marching higher — replacing the pumps altogether with electronic ones is just not an option.

“The new ones run between $10,000 and $15,000 apiece,” Colville said. “It’s an expense that’s not worth it.”

Mechanical meters can be retrofitted with higher numbers when pump prices climb another dollar. The last time that happened was in late 2005, when gas went over $3 a gallon, and owners of the older pumps installed kits that went to $3.999.

This time around, owners of the old pumps will need to install another kit that can handle prices up to $4.999, and possibly higher. Industry experts say those changes could cost as much as $650 per pump.

It costs less to change the meter to raise the maximum price from $2.99 to $3.99 a gallon, but that option raises the risk of a breakdown, said said Pete Turner, chief operating officer for APS Petroleum Equipment Inc. of Anniston, Ala.

“The computer that they’re upgrading was not designed to go any more than what it’s going now, and if you do it, they don’t last long enough,” Turner said. “They run so fast that the gears are wearing out.”

The price of fixing the meters jumped in the past three years because old pumps are being phased out for new electronic pumps and demand for refurbished meters is down, Al Eichorn, vice president of PMP Corp., which makes the mechanical meters.

The Avon, Conn., company has hired extra employees who are working overtime but still has a 14-week backlog of orders, Eichorn said.

To deal with the problem, some state regulators are allowing half-pricing — displaying the price for a half-gallon of gas, then doubling the price shown on the meter.

In North Dakota, regulators recently told service stations their mechanical pumps could use half-pricing, provided they use signs to alert costumers and find a permanent solution by April 2009.

South Dakota is preparing similar rules, officials say. And in Minnesota, rural service station owners whose pumps cannot display the right price are being told to cover up the incorrect numbers.

“The consumer can only see the gallons turning,” said Bill Walsh, a spokesman for the Minnesota Department of Commerce. “Then they just have to settle up with a calculator, basically.” Colville and about a dozen other service station owners in Washington have received temporary variances from the state to allow them to half-price fuel.

Stations granted variances are required to post signs telling customers that the final price they will pay is twice what the pump meter indicates.

“No, that don’t bother me. The price does,” said Jim Puls, a third-generation rancher who pulled up to Colville’s diesel pump to fill up his flatbed truck at $4.41 a gallon. “I can understand what they have to do.”

Nationally, the average price for a gallon of gasoline rose past $3.70 Sunday, while diesel was selling for an average of $4.33 a gallon, according to AAA and the Oil Price Information Service.

Small stations are struggling to make a profit on gas, even as the price rises. Its small profit margin makes it less lucrative that snacks and other products the stores sell inside.

“If gas is the profit driver and you are one of those guys with the old pumps, you’re either evolving or getting out,” said Jeff Lenard, spokesman for the National Association of Convenience Stores, a trade group that represents about 115,000 stores that sell gasoline.

“If you’re just that kind of image of the ’50s gas station where you have a conversation, fill up and have a cup of coffee, that’s in the movies.”

___

Associated Press Writer Dale Wetzel in Bismarck, N.D., contributed to this report.

Just part of the mix of what is needed to survive.

By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Technology Writer Sun May 4, 3:38 AM ET

MILTON, Ontario - The glowing amber dot on a light switch in the entryway of George Tsapoitis’ house offers a clue about the future of electricity.

A few times this summer, when millions of air conditioners strain the Toronto region’s power grid, that pencil-tip-sized amber dot will blink. It will be asking Tsapoitis to turn the switch off — unless he’s already programmed his house to make that move for him.

This is the beginning of a new way of thinking about electricity, and the biggest change in how we get power since wires began veining the landscape a century ago.

For all the engineering genius behind the electric grid, that vast network ferrying energy from power plants through transmission lines isn’t particularly smart when it meets our homes. We flip a switch or plug something in and generally get as much power as we’re willing to pay for.

But these days the environmental consequences and unfriendly economics of energy appear unsustainable. As a result, power providers and technology companies are making the electric grid smarter.

It will stop being merely a passive supplier of juice. Instead, power companies will be able to cue us, like those amber lights in Tsapoitis’ house, to make choices about when and how we consume power. And most likely, we’ll have our computers and appliances carry out those decisions for us.

Done right, the smarter grid should save consumers money in the long run by reducing the need for new power plants, which we pay off in our monthly electric bills. However, if people fail to react properly to conservation signals, their bills could spike.

And certainly a smart grid that can encourage us to conserve will feel different. Envision your kitchen appliances in silent communication with their power source: The fridge bumps its temperature up a degree on one day, and the dishwasher kicks on a bit later on another.

Smart-grid technologies have gotten small tests throughout North America, as utilities and regulators scout how to coax people to reduce their demand for power. But there’s little doubt it’s coming. The utility Xcel Energy Inc. plans to soon begin a $100 million smart grid project reaching 100,000 homes in Boulder, Colo.

In Milton, an exurb where dense subdivisions encroach on farm fields, a test with the Tsapoitis family and 200 other households reveals what will be possible — and how much more work needs to happen.

Tsapoitis uses his computer to visit an online control panel that configures his home’s energy consumption. He chooses its temperature and which lights should be on or off at certain times of the day. He can set rules for different kinds of days, so the house might be warmer and darker on summer weekdays when his family is out.

The family can override those changes manually, whether it’s by turning on the porch light or raising the thermostat to ward off a Canadian chill. But the system guards against waste. If midnight comes and no one has remembered to lower the thermostat and turn off the porch light, those steps just happen.

These little tweaks add up nicely for another person testing the Milton system, Marian Rakusan. He’s saved at least $300 on utility bills since the program began in September. Tsapoitis and his wife, Lisa, aren’t certain of their savings but say their 2,400-square-foot home has lower energy bills than a friend’s 1,800-square-footer.

This alone is not revolutionary, because programmable thermostats and other “smart home” controls let people craft similar resource-saving plans. The big change here is the combination of these controls with that blinking amber light on the switch — where the grid talks back.

Milton’s local gas and electricity retailer, Direct Energy, will set those amber dots blinking in an emergency. It might happen a few times in a summer month. Maybe there will be congestion in Ontario’s overtaxed transmission network. Perhaps a power plant will be down for maintenance. Or rapacious air conditioners will overwhelm electric capacity.

Whatever the cause, at that moment, this section of the grid needs a reduction in demand, fast, or else outages loom.

People in Milton’s test are expected to configure a “brownout” setting on their computers, indicating how their homes should respond in such a situation. In this test, Direct Energy also will enforce conservation remotely. It can raise the set temperature in a participant’s home by 2 degrees Celsius in the summer (nearly 4 degrees Fahrenheit), reducing its air conditioning load. The company also has permission to shut off the testers’ hot-water heaters and electric pool pumps for four hours at time during these power emergencies.

Tsapoitis shrugs at that aspect of the arrangement. It’s better than rolling blackouts. Rakusan, however, says he’s not sure he likes the idea of the power company tweaking his home’s settings.

Indeed, it appears unlikely that broad swaths of the public will accept remote control from the power company. California officials recently had to back away from a proposal to require remote-controlled thermostats in new buildings.

So a more likely scenario is that consumers will get powerful economic incentives to make those decisions themselves.

Typically we pay a flat rate for electricity, even if sometimes it falls below the actual costs of supplying power at a given moment. In a growing number of places, rates move slightly higher in hours that typically are busiest.

An advanced notion of this will be tested this summer in 1,100 homes served by Baltimore Gas & Electric. Pricing plans will vary, but generally the households will pay the cheapest, “off-peak” rates most of the time. Some testers will pay higher rates every weekday afternoon. And all of them will be subject to “critical peak” periods of even higher charges, declared on as many as 12 weekday afternoons with stress on the grid.

The Maryland utility will have its own version of Milton’s amber dots. Most of the homes will get 3-inch-high orbs that will glow different colors to indicate the price of electricity: red instead of their usual green, for example, during critical peak periods.

Even this will probably be a primitive step.

Eventually, the smart grid will let rates fluctuate even more dynamically, depending on conditions. That already happens in wholesale electricity markets, in which power suppliers buy energy from power producers. Now that would extend to the retail level — our homes. The price of electricity would dip when demand is softest, typically at night or on mild days, and rise in periods of strain.

There’s only one problem. “Consumers are not sitting at home waiting for the latest signal from the power grid,” says Rob Pratt, a scientist with the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “To get the kind of widespread response that we’d really like to have, keeping it automatic is real important.”

In other words, appliances designed to interact with the smarter electric grid will adjust themselves.

Pratt’s lab has already built and tested controllers that can make it happen. And over the next decade, Pratt expects homes to get appliance controls with a sliding scale. At one end people could choose something like “maximize my ease and comfort.” At the other, “save me the maximum amount of money.” The highest-conservation settings might lead dishwashers to start only when electricity prices are at their lowest, or when wind power has kicked on.

When Pratt and colleagues tested aspects of this in 112 homes in Washington state, they determined the average household’s electricity bills would drop 10 percent.

It says a lot that conservation would be encouraged by the very companies that make money off the use of electricity. But they have no real choice.

Electricity use per home rose 23 percent from 1981 to 2001, according to the Department of Energy. Blame increases in electronics and appliances, and our decreasing tolerance for sweating through the summers. The Census Bureau says 46 percent of single-family homes completed in the U.S. in 1975 had air conditioning. In 2006 that was 89 percent.

Meanwhile, meeting that demand is getting trickier. Raw materials that fuel power plants are soaring in price and being eyed more skeptically by regulators concerned about air quality and greenhouse gases. And that’s even before the next U.S. president, as seems likely, supports caps on carbon emissions.

“We just can’t keep building more coal plants,” says Roy Palmer, head of regulatory affairs at Xcel Energy.

So until some bountiful and clean power source can be delivered cheaply, electric utilities are pressured to extend the generating capacity we already have.

The effects of well-chosen reductions in usage — an idea known as “demand response” — can be huge. A mere 5 percent improvement in U.S. electric efficiency would prevent 90 large coal-fired power plants from having to be built over the next 20 years, according to Jon Wellinghoff, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission who advocates demand response.

Demand response isn’t new, but it’s existed in low-tech form. Utilities in capacity crunches would call companies and request that they do something to help, like idling an assembly line for a few hours. In some states, residents can get rebates if they let the utility trigger radio transmitters on their air conditioners that cycle the chillers off for a few minutes in strained summer hours.

Now though, technology can do demand response in a more sophisticated way.

Companies such as EnerNOC Inc. have built software and sensor networks that can remotely dim lights or raise refrigerator temperatures inside businesses, in an instant. For homes, upgraded electric meters can offer near-real-time feedback on energy use. And new generations of appliances and thermostats can coordinate with each other and electric meters over in-home wireless networks.

The key hurdle is figuring out how to pay for it all.

The equipment in Milton’s tests costs more than $1,000 per house. That will come down with larger-scale efforts, and utilities will save money as networked meters free them from sending out human meter readers each month. But for bigger smart-grid investments, energy companies generally want regulators to let them recoup the costs through higher electric rates. That can get thorny.

Tsapoitis hopes some kind of smarter system sticks after his test ends in Milton this fall. When asked why he signed up, he said it might keep his 4-year-old son, Brogan, from worrying about global warming and other environmental threats. He pointed to a tattoo running down his arm that spells out Brogan’s name in an Old English font.

“That,” he said, “is what we do it for.”

The price to top off a scooter’s gas tank is enough for some drivers to trade in their guzzler

By BOB NORBERG
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Even as gasoline prices soar, the car is still king and fuel-stingy scooters are not threatening to dethrone it.

And though the demand for scooters is growing, it remains a niche market, said Roy Gattinella, co-owner of Revolution Moto in Santa Rosa.

“If anything will tip them into the mainstream, it will be gas prices,” Gattinella said.

The average price of gas is $3.90 in Sonoma County, with some stations hitting $4, according to the California State Automobile Association.

Those high prices are fueling a surge in scooter sales, Gattinella said.

In the first quarter of this year, scooter sales climbed 24 percent over last year, said Mike Mount, a spokesman for the Motorcycle Industry Council in Irvine. “I don’t have numbers to prove it, but I suspect it is gas prices,” Mount said.

Gattinella said the surge is playing out at his store.

“The last two weeks have been crazy; we have people waiting at the door when we open,” Gattinella said. “In the last couple of weeks, we have been selling three to five a day.”

Scooter owners will tell you how much fun they are, but at 65 miles per gallon, they also tout the savings.

“The Wine Country is beautiful on a scooter,” said Jennifer DeBello of Santa Rosa, who rides a Vespa. “And it takes $5 to fill the gas tank. That’s refreshing.”

Derek Ruetsch, a private jet pilot from Windsor who bought a Vespa two years ago, said the difference in gasoline costs can be staggering.

“I was filling up with gas and someone was next to me in a large SUV,” Ruetsch said. “It took me $5.83 to fill up; they said it cost them $76.”

Although he bought his Vespa for the savings, it has become his everyday transportation. “Unless I have to haul something from Home Depot, my car stays in the garage,” Ruetsch said.

Scooters long have been popular for the masses in Europe, Asia and South America. Riders can zip through street traffic, some more powerful models can use the freeway and they typically get two to three times the mileage of even the most fuel-efficient sedans.

Prices can start at $1,500 and go up to $10,000.

Revolution Moto has the Taiwan-made Genuine Scooter Buddy for $2,595, an Italian-made Aprilia for $2,799, and its best seller, a popular Vespa, for $4,299.

North Bay Motorsports and Marine in Santa Rosa has Hondas and the South Korean-made Hyosung scooters, costing $1,500 to $8,500.

Despite the fuel economy, scooters have not caught on in the United States.

“It’s America and we are not in Europe,” said Rodney Frost, general manager of North Bay Motorsports and Marine, who said scooter sales are up 20 percent but still lag behind motorcycles.

Gattinella said some people have safety concerns, and others just like the comfort of a car.

Still, scooters are more mainstream now than when he started the shop five years ago, when gas was $1.69 a gallon.

“Now it’s a cross-section of the North Bay . . . carpenters, policemen, doctors, nurses, pilots, school teachers, a lot of blue-collar workers,” Gattinella said.

You can reach Staff Writer Bob Norberg at 521-5206 or bob.norberg@pressdemocrat.com