City of Gridley v. Super. Ct.

BACKGROUND

The City operates an electric utility called the Gridley Electric Utility. The utility receives the bulk of its revenues from selling power to residential, commercial, and industrial customers. These revenues (along with the utility’s other revenues) are placed

2 in the City’s electric enterprise fund—a fund that tracks monies received and expended for electric service. (See Citizens for Fair REU Rates v. City of Redding (2018) 6 Cal.5th 1, 5-6 (Citizens for Fair REU Rates) [“An enterprise fund is a budgetary device ‘used to track monies received and expended for municipal services where fees or charges to the users of those services pay wholly or in part for such services’ ”].) In recent years, the City has annually transferred between $1,200,000 and $1,600,000 from its electric enterprise fund to its general fund. The city council sets the utility’s electric rates. Before November 2020, the City’s electric rates for residential customers had five tiers, with users charged different prices for different amounts of use. Users were charged 16.2 cents per kilowatt for the first 475 kilowatt-hours used per month (tier 1), 22.4 cents per kilowatt for the next 100…