Treasure Island has had 537 power outages. That is not bad luck. It is a long-running, city-owned failure that the city refuses to name because naming it would force action.
I write this as a resident who has lived with the outages, and as a member of the only citizen advisory body the SFPUC answers to. I have sat in the meetings. Everyone agrees it is serious, then everyone finds a reason to delay.
The website I help maintain, treasureislandsfpoweroutages.com, documents 537 outages on Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island — roughly one every two to three weeks, sustained for a quarter century. These shut off refrigerators, medical devices, sewage pumps, and front door locks.
SFPUC has admitted, in writing, that the “legacy” grid serving the islands is well past its expected life. In its Sept.10, 2025 presentation to the SFPUC Commission, the agency states the system is 40 to 50 years old or more, against a typical equipment life of 25 to 30 years — at least 50 percent beyond design life, by the city’s own slide deck. So the question is not whether Treasure Island has an emergency. The city’s own documents make that case. The question is why the city will not say the word and act like it.
Who owns the grid, and why the answer keeps shifting
This is a city-run shell game. TIDA, the Treasure Island Development Authority, owns the legacy system most residents are connected to. SFPUC operates and maintains it under contract, and bills residents for power.
Ask TIDA why the grid keeps failing, and it points at SFPUC. Ask SFPUC, and it points back at TIDA. SFPUC’s assistant general manager has put it on the record: “TIDA sets the electric rates out there, TIDA sets the program for improvement, and we act as a contractor to them.” The agency with the engineers claims it’s only the vendor; the agency without them claims it’s only the landlord. Nothing ever becomes the city’s problem, even though both agencies are the city. This isn’t a federal or PG&E issue — the Navy left in 1997. Every party here is San Francisco. The city already has the authority. It refuses to use it.
This is a priority problem, not an engineering one. On Feb. 23, 2026, the SFPUC Commission voted to expand Administrative Code Section 99.5, which lets a private customer build electric infrastructure on SFPUC’s behalf and transfer it to the city — so Cordia could build a downtown substation faster.
So when a private downtown customer wants an expedited, privately funded substation, the city can amend the Administrative Code and move quickly. When 1,800 Treasure Island residents, plus a growing list of developers, need the 50-year-old Navy-era grid replaced, the city has had 25 years and still will not declare an emergency. That is not a capacity problem. That is a choice.
A hard truth for public power advocates
Many public power advocates, myself included, want San Francisco to buy PG&E’s local grid, because PG&E’s reliability has been poor and its lines have contributed to catastrophic wildfires. But the same SFPUC that runs the well-regarded Hetch Hetchy system has overseen 537 outages on Treasure Island, because TIDA won’t fund a rebuild and SFPUC won’t force the issue. If San Francisco can’t deliver functioning public power to a neighborhood it already owns, the case for taking over hundreds of thousands of PG&E accounts gets harder to make. Fixing Treasure Island isn’t a distraction from public power — it’s a prerequisite.
In July 2023, a federal jury convicted SFPUC’s former general manager, Harlan Kelly Jr., of wire fraud, conspiracy, and bank fraud, and sentenced him to four years for taking bribes from a city contractor. We are not being dramatic when we say the city has not acted in good faith.
For years I have filed Sunshine Ordinance and CPRA requests to track capital spending and outage counts. On April 11, 2025, SFPUC’s Public Records division told me it would “generally not be able to comply” with Sunshine and CPRA deadlines for any of my requests. I filed a complaint with the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, File No. 25030. My response: if there weren’t so many outages, there wouldn’t be so many records requests.
What should happen now
Treasure Island needs four things this quarter, not another “near term measures” press release:
1. Declare an emergency. The mayor and Board of Supervisors should declare the legacy grid a public safety emergency under Administrative Code Chapter 7 and direct SFPUC to treat full replacement, not patching, as the baseline. The city’s own September 2025 slide deck is the factual predicate.
2. Fund it like a real project. A full legacy replacement must appear in SFPUC’s capital plan as a named, funded project with a completion date — not a footnote “subject to TIDA authorization.”
3. Use the authority the city just expanded. If Section 99.5 is good enough for Cordia’s substation, it’s good enough to let developers fund a full Treasure Island rebuild under the same terms.
4. Stop retaliating against records requests. SFPUC should rescind the April 11 “rule of reason” letter and publish a public outage log, updated monthly.
For nearly a decade, I have asked San Francisco to fix a grid it already owns. The city keeps saying it is complicated. It is not. It is a choice. San Francisco has the engineers, the money, and the authority. What it hasn’t done is decide that Treasure Island counts.
Declare the emergency. Fund the rebuild. Use the authority. Publish the records. Five hundred thirty-seven outages is enough.
Barklee Sanders is a technology consultant, a Treasure Island resident, and a member of the SFPUC Citizens’ Advisory Committee representing District 6. Views expressed here are his own and not those of the commission.
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