Faces of EBCE — Dan Tavares Arriola

EBCE is expanding to serve three new cities in 2021 — Newark, Pleasanton, and Tracy. Customer outreach efforts are underway now, and service begins in April.

With the City of Tracy joining, EBCE for the first time will extend out of Alameda County and into the Central Valley. Tracy is the second-largest city in San Joaquin County, with about 95,000 residents.

The biggest champion for Tracy to join EBCE was city council member Dan Arriola, who was attracted by EBCE’s commitment to clean energy and the opportunity to meet city goals.

“I think every city needs to make efforts to address climate change,” he says. “It will affect cities, the whole nation, and really the whole world.”

“In January, our Council made it part of the official city strategic plan to pursue green infrastructure,” he recalls. “In 2019, when the opportunity was first discussed, the federal government wasn’t taking action on climate change, so it came down to the state and the cities to act.

Tracy’s Infrastructure Master Plan covers all services and facilities that keep the City functioning, such as transportation, buildings, power, and telecommunications. Arriola sees EBCE as a good vehicle for pursuing the clean energy and climate goals in the plan.

“It takes local leadership on the ground to make those changes. I thought joining EBCE was an opportunity for Tracy to lead the way for Central Valley communities.”

Giving Back to the Community

Tracy has about 29,000 residential and 3000 commercial, industrial, and municipal customers, with about 430 GWh of electricity demand per year (before accounting for any customers who may opt out of EBCE service). This could boost total EBCE sales by about 7 percent.

Tracy is also bringing a lot of solar customers. About 6000 customers have gone solar, or about one in five, with a total of over 50 megawatts of capacity. That makes it the EBCE member city with the largest power output from solar, and second only to Oakland in the number of solar customers. In all, Tracy residents and businesses generate about a quarter of their own power.

Councilmember Arriola is looking forward to more of this kind of green infrastructure and investment in Tracy.

“EBCE’s local development programs are a big opportunity to partner with local organizations,” he says.

Despite his young age, Arriola has had plenty of experience in working with local groups.

Born in 1989, Arriola had lived in the Azores, Portugal, during his early childhood after his mother, a native of Portugal, and father, who is Mexican-American, divorced. Portuguese was in fact his first language.

His mother brought him back to California in 1993. “My family in Portugal were fishermen,” Arriola told the Stockton Record. “My mom wanted us to come back because she wanted more for me than to be a fisherman.”

Once back in the U.S., Arriola’s parents remarried. Dan went to school in Tracy, and worked with his mother as a teen doing housecleaning and janitorial work. He had a second job at Jamba Juice and for a while even had a third job at Target.

Despite working hard, he also studied hard. He was the first person in his family to go to college, attending UCLA on scholarships. He continued at the USC Law School where he was the student body president, graduating in 2014.

After law school he returned to Tracy and opened up his own law practice.

“I always felt I wanted to come back, because I was so frustrated (here),” Arriola said. “Nothing is going to change unless people come back to make a difference.”

Back in Tracy, he worked hard to create new opportunities for other young people. He founded STRIVE, or Scholars Together to Reform Inequality in Valley Education, to motivate high school students to continue reaching for their own career goals. He also founded the Young Professionals of Tracy, and has also served on the boards of the Tracy Chamber of Commerce, the Tracy Youth Advisory Commission, and the One.TLC School for Homeless Children.

He was soon hired as a deputy district attorney for San Joaquin County. In 2018 he became a “Neighborhood DA,” part of a new program by the district attorney’s office to resolve neighborhood issues through progressive prosecution strategies before they lead to crimes subject to the traditional criminal justice system.

He was elected to the Tracy school board in 2016, then to the Tracy City Council in 2018. At the age of 29 he became the youngest Councilmember in the history of the City of Tracy, as well as the first openly LGBTQ elected official in the city. While on the Council, in addition to joining EBCE, Arriola has also championed efforts to address homelessness, legalize commercial cannabis, and enact local social equity reform.

Why Joining EBCE

Arriola was a big advocate for the City of Tracy to join EBCE, and he is now Tracy’s representative on the EBCE board and executive committee.

“It really came down to me wanting to champion green renewable energy for Tracy,” he says.

“We had some presentations by PG&E after the wildfires,” he recalls. “I really grilled them, like a prosecutor. I perceived the wildfires to come from absolute legal negligence. So I wanted to see what other opportunities were available.”

After the city staff studied options, EBCE emerged as the best choice.

Still, “it was quite a lift for the Council,” he recalls. “Not everyone was motivated like I was for green energy. But a lot of people wanted to reduce their bill.” The council approved membership in October of 2019.

With the startup of service looming in April, Arriola is spreading the word in the community. “I’m fielding lots of questions from the public who are still finding out about it as they get announcements in the mail,” he says. “Now it’s about educating the community and easing those FAQs.”

“Joining the EBCE board showed me the amount of good work EBCE does for member communities,” he says.

“They don’t focus just on economics but also on fighting climate change, and that’s very appealing. Too often it’s only about the numbers, but we have the chance to go beyond that and hear the community and act on their behalf.”