Making your utility state run risks the the same "not our money" and "what are they gonna do, fire the whole department" issues that cause police department to hire trigger-happy jerks who kill people and leave the town with the bill.
True for the US federal government, less true for US state governments, and pretty much not at all true for governments subordinate to US state governments, for reasons which should be intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.
> Making your utility state run risks the the same "not our money" and "what are they gonna do, fire the whole department" issues that cause police department to hire trigger-happy jerks who kill people and leave the town with the bill.
I think you have misattributed the cause; the cause of that (where it is endemic rather than an error that the department really is trying to avoid but sometimes failing) is that the voting citizens actually want trigger-happy jerks in the police department (because they largely see the police department as a weapon aimed at oeople they dislike) and the bills that they get stuck with as a result are insufficient to dissuade them from that preference (this is helped because local taxes that pay for those bills tend to be weighted away from the local voting population, whether by being regressive—leveraging the income/political participation correlation—or by sweeping local-activity by non-locsl residents into its base.)
But even privileged political elites probably want their electric utility to function VB reliably and not burn down wide swathes of the state.
Disagree fully, especially in one party states. In the federal government if you department is perpetually crap there's always a risk some senator will make cleaning you up their shtick. In state government unacceptable performance seems to be tolerated and allowed to continue indefinitely.
The risk for state governments (particularly after the passage of—or, more precisely, after the courts started giving effect to the due process clause of—the 14th Amendment, though this wasn't entirely absent previously) is that they will be held accountable by the federal government.
> In the federal government if you department is perpetually crap there's always a risk some senator will make cleaning you up their shtick.
That's also true in state government.
> In state government unacceptable performance seems to be tolerated and allowed to continue indefinitely.
I think that what you are really saying is that there are states whw ere the participating electorate has different standards for what is acceptable, or at least important, than you do, no different from a commercial market where the mass of actively participating customers don't share your priorities.
Because those problems you listed sound like money problems, which in California makes me think of Prop 13 as the likely culprit.