The Los Angeles Times has a good piece today on green-energy shenanigans going on in California. An excerpt:

A business venture led by a friend and advisor to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa outmaneuvered the city last year to buy land in Kern County that the Department of Water and Power wanted for a wind farm.
The purchase of Onyx Ranch, which covers nearly 68,000 acres east of Bakersfield, highlights the dual roles played by J. Ari Swiller, an entrepreneur whose field, renewable energy, has received a significant boost from the mayor’s pledge to make Los Angeles “the greenest big city in America.”
Swiller and the mayor have long-standing ties. Both were employed by supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle at the start of the decade, after Villaraigosa lost his first run for mayor. When Villaraigosa announced his second mayoral bid in 2004, Swiller served as a campaign fundraiser. And after Villaraigosa won, Swiller helped him decide who should be appointed to various city commissions.
Since 2004, Swiller also has been a co-owner of Renewable Resources Group, a Los Angeles-based firm that develops and invests in clean energy.
In the case of Onyx Ranch, the venture headed by Swiller beat the DWP to the land, bought it for $48 million and, before the transaction was completed, offered to sell less than half of it to the utility for $65 million.
H. David Nahai, the DWP’s general manager, rejected the offer. Swiller’s venture, a partnership between his and another firm, then sold the portion sought by Los Angeles for $42 million to the city of Vernon, a neighboring industrial community with its own electric utility.
Since then, Los Angeles officials have been weighing whether to wage a potentially costly and lengthy legal battle against Vernon to gain ownership of the land, considered prime territory for towering turbines that would generate electricity from the winds that blow across the Tehachapi Mountains.
Villaraigosa’s appointees at the DWP met behind closed doors two weeks ago to discuss a possible purchase from Vernon, a move that would help the mayor keep his promise to bring wind, solar and geothermal to the nation’s largest municipally owned utility.
The man monitoring the DWP’s progress on that promise is Deputy Mayor S. David Freeman, who was appointed in April to handle environmental issues for Villaraigosa. Freeman also knows Swiller, having helped him found Renewable Resources Group in 2004. He left the firm in 2005 to become one of the mayor’s harbor commissioners.
Swiller has repeatedly declined requests from The Times to say whether he has other business activities that intersect with the mayor’s policy priorities. He also declined to be interviewed directly, asking that questions be sent to his lawyer.
In her written responses, attorney Lynda B. Goldman said Swiller did not know that the DWP wanted control of Onyx Ranch until early 2008. A private wind developer who was party to the negotiations, however, said that he believes Swiller knew of the DWP’s involvement months earlier.

It’s just taxpayer money. Shouldn’t a friend of the mayor be able to make a few bucks for himself?