Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is one of the last places in Southern California where the night sky still looks the way it did before any of us were born. No freeway glow, no development creeping toward the horizon — just 650,000 acres of open desert and more stars than most people will ever see in one place. It is designated a Dark Sky Park for exactly that reason.
I’m a San Diego County native; I grew up camping in Anza Borrego Park with the Girl Scouts, and I understand why this region is worth protecting. Temecula is a beautiful, pastoral community and a premier winery destination, attracting tourism, weddings, and visitors from across the country.
That’s why I strongly oppose San Diego Gas & Electric’s proposed Golden Pacific Powerlink. Its plan to run 200-foot transmission towers through Temecula’s neighborhoods and wine country, and through the heart of Anza-Borrego, to move electricity that will mostly serve communities elsewhere is just not right for our community.
I have spent time under Anza-Borrego’s dark skies, and I know that landscape was not meant to carry 200-foot transmission towers. Temecula’s neighborhoods, wine country and creek beds were not meant to become an industrial power corridor either.
No one disputes that California needs a reliable grid. But SDG&E has proposed a plan that places nearly all of the risk on the communities along this route while sending most of the benefit elsewhere. San Diego County ratepayers would help pay for a line that returns only a fraction of its power to the region. That is not how a fair energy policy is supposed to work.
Jim Desmond says he opposes this Powerlink now. But before anyone takes him at his word, let’s review the history: In 2008, as mayor of San Marcos, Desmond appeared before state regulators and testified in support of SDG&E’s Sunrise Powerlink — the utility’s prior attempt to run a major transmission line through our backcountry and along the edge of Anza-Borrego. He raised no concerns about the park or the communities in its path. He stood with the utility.
And when San Diego County had the opportunity to give ratepayers a genuine alternative to SDG&E through Community Choice Energy, Desmond voted no. Not once, but twice — in 2019 and again in 2021 — while a majority of his colleagues chose to move forward without him.
Desmond opposes SDG&E’s plans when the political cost of silence is high. He has sided with the utility, or simply stepped aside, when the outcome mattered less publicly and more substantively. That is not a record of standing up to SDG&E. It’s a record of Jim Desmond saying whatever it takes to protect Jim Desmond, not us.
My record is different, because I have taken these fights on directly. I wrote to the California Public Utilities Commission urging regulators to investigate the rising electricity and gas rates San Diego families were being charged — rates that remain among the highest in California. On the San Diego City Council, when SDG&E needed a new franchise agreement to keep serving our city, I did not simply approve it.
I insisted on real accountability, and I authored the amendment now requiring SDG&E executives to appear before elected officials every year to publicly defend their rates, rather than quietly raising them and answering to no one. [Verify before publication: sourcing for claim re: SDG&E workforce/labor practices]
Nothing about the Golden Pacific Powerlink has been decided. SDG&E has not finalized its route, and the CPUC has not ruled. That means people living in its path still have standing to be heard, and I am adding my voice to oppose the Golden State Powerlink. I have stood up to powerful corporations before, in a courtroom and on the City Council, and I will do it again in Congress.
Temecula and Anza-Borrego are worth defending. I intend to do exactly that.
Marni von Wilpert is a San Diego City Council member and a Democratic candidate for California’s 48th Congressional District in the 2026 election.
