Californians blame it all on Enron, but that can't be the only reason, right?
I’d guess the problem is more endemic to their political system.
Berlin for example had a massive bank collapse in 2001 under the Conservative government that ended up placing the state of Berlin into billions of euros worth of debt and financial risk. The succeeding SD/Left/Green triplet coalitions had to fire-sell off many state-held assets like the water utility (that ended up a disaster on its own [2]) and especially a huge amount of residential real estate, which is now contributing to the insane rent explosions in Berlin.
To this day, Berlin hasn't recovered from all the penny-pinching of the last decades.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berliner_Bankenskandal
[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berliner_Wasserbetriebe#Streit...
We have not had anything on the scale of what the GP describes of a city going billions into debt - even Birmingham is orders of magnitude less bad.
The government sold assets, but not at fire sale prices. I do not think selling utilities was a great idea, but its not as bad as either what GP describes, nor the "small town in Michigan" example at the top of this thread (when did you last experience a blackout in the UK?).
They organized and succeeded.
Where was the opposition? Is the entire German environmental movement beholden to the Green Party?
And even it they don't seem to have memory now of doing so, I applaud them for this specific decision back then.