Richard Riordan, a leading Republican candidate for governor and former mayor of Los Angeles, last week lashed out at Calfironia’s Gov. Gray Davis for allegedly mishandling the state’s ongoing energy crisis and injecting the state into too strong a role within the electricity industry.

Riordan said if he is elected he will abolish the three-month-old California Consumer Power and Conservation Financing Authority, along with dramatically scaling back electricity regulation, according to a report Thursday in the Los Angeles Times.

Criticizing the Davis administration for first “inaction and then overreaction,” Riordan went to Sacramento Wednesday to state his case that future generations will have to pay for what he called the mistakes of the current leadership of the state, including the creation of the power authority.

“State government has never been able to do anything well,” Riordan was quoted as saying in the Times. “The state should not be in the business of building new power plants; this should be left to private industry and to municipal power authorities. In the long-run, (the state) is going to screw up.”

Riordan said he would also eliminate the state transmission grid operator, Cal-ISO, in favor of joining a regional transmission organization (RTO) serving western states. He also said it was imperative that the state try to renegotiate its $43 billion in long-term power supply contracts.

Gov. Davis’ chairman of the new power authority, S. David Freeman, former general manager of the City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power under Riordan, was very critical of his former boss, noting that he was “dealing with subject matters he’s unfamiliar with. He says one thing today and another thing tomorrow,” he was quoted as saying in the Times report.

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