San Jose Business Owners Say PG&E Outages Cost Them Tens of Thousands
SAN JOSE (CBS SF) -- A group of small business owners in San Jose are complaining that PG&E completely short-circuited their businesses and cost them tens of thousands of dollars.
PG&E cut power to The Market Place shopping center just north of downtown San Jose in order to install charging stations for electric vehicles.
"We have to pretty much empty everything out of this restaurant because it's a long day to be without power -- 12 hours," says Amit Rajgarhia, district manager for Dish N Dash chain of restaurants.
Amit says the decision to cut power to the shopping center in the middle of the week and during the heart of the business day was disruptive and costly for the roughly two dozen restaurants and stores impacted.
"A blown up transformer, we could understand that. We would never ever complain. The letter from PG&E said it was for safety reasons, but obviously there's more to it than that. It's about installing a charger for Tesla. So, my employees are like 'Why am I getting shafted for someone's Tesla charging?'" he said.
Amit say he and others tried repeatedly to call the customer service phone number listed on PG&E's letter notifying them of the scheduled outage to express their concerns. They were never able to reach an actual customer service representative on the phone and he says no one returned the multiple messages that he left.
He says he wishes the work was done at night or on a weekend when it would have cost the businesses very little. He says he regrets having to send dozens of workers home without pay.
"My employees were frustrated because even one day without pay is going to affect them," says Carlos Rosas on behalf of the 30 employees he manages for Dish N Dash.
PG&E released a prepared statement reading, "Planned power outages occur Monday through Friday during business hours unless there is a safety risk to the public, and we take all impacts into consideration to ensure we minimize disruptions."
Business owners at the shopping center say that response is tone-deaf and ignore the many struggles they've endured during the pandemic.
"We're losing a whole day of business basically. And not only that, we're losing all of the veggies, the meats -- all of that they're losing because there's no refrigeration so we have to throw it out," says Zolmay Rasuli, owner of Halal Gyro Express.