There are several things wrong with this argument. First, the city may have spent $100,000 on a study, but we gained substantially more than that from PSE - it was in fact a great investment.  PSE will admit they started to pay attention to BI and investing more money in our community.  Pretty cool.  Second, Matt Tirman said at one point during the campaign that he would consider a community utility if we couldn't meet our emission reduction targets because of PSE. Later he said it might be too expensive, but apparently he didn't think it was such a bad investment.