Year: 2024

The ceremony is more than a turning point in the trainees’ lives. As the culmination of Irvine’s 100th CERT class, it marks a milestone in the City’s 25-year disaster preparedness effort.

“CERT is dedicated to engaging the whole community in disaster preparedness by educating and training its members to be self-sufficient during a disaster and to effectively assist others and their families,” said Christine Tully, emergency management program specialist in the Irvine Police Department (IPD) and the City’s point person for CERT. “Our vision is to make Irvine a resilient city, effectively prepared to recover following a disaster, through preparedness training, education, and community outreach.”

If the Public Utilities Commission approves the tax as it currently stands, the monthly bills for millions of users who consume small amounts of electricity and solarized homeowners will go up while the bills of large consumers of electricity will go down.

After public backlash, a group of lawmakers in Sacramento has now introduced a bill to severely limit the new so-called “utility tax.”

OCPA’s push for new members comes as Huntington Beach prepares to leave the embattled agency. 

The fact is, OCPA is not delivering what it advertises. OCPA is simply an energy trading house organized as a Community Choice Energy (CCE) agency. It competes against Southern California Edison (SCE) for the procurement of energy, while SCE continues to deliver everyone’s electricity.

OCPA’s operations are farmed out to a group of highly paid consultants who operate many of California’s CCE agencies using a template that hides sub-par results from naïve consumers.