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A veteran utility consumer rights group based in San Francisco has a new executive director.
Mark Toney, who took office on Jan. 1, will be the fifth executive director of The Utility Reform Network, or TURN, which supports affordable utility rates and access to renewable energy for residential customers and small businesses in California.
The first director was consumer activist Sylvia Siegel, who founded TURN, originally called Toward Utility Rate Normalization, at her kitchen table in Mill Valley in 1973.
Siegel, who retired as executive director in 1989, was instrumental in bringing about low-cost “lifeline” electricity, gas and telephone rates for low-income elderly people. She died in August at the age of 89.
Toney, 47, received a doctorate in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley last year and previously worked for 12 years as a utility consumer advocate in Oakland and Rhode Island.
He was born in Barstow, graduated from Vintage High School in Napa and received his college degree from Brown University.
TURN Board Chair Carl Wood, a former member of the California Public Utilities Commission, said Toney “has the ideal combination of knowledge, experience and skills to move TURN’s agenda forward.”
Wood said, “He cut his teeth as an activist fighting for affordable electric rates and has successfully led many campaigns for social and economic justice since then.”
Toney said last week: “TURN stands as the major political force holding back the floodgates of deregulation that would leave Californians vulnerable to unlimited rate hikes.
“We must replace the free market policies that have harmed our state with fair market policies that protect both consumers and the environment, improving the lives of everyone in California.”
Toney served as executive director of the Center for Third World Organizing in Oakland from 2000 to 2004, expanding organizer training programs and working on a national campaign for racial justice in welfare policy. From 1986 to 1994, Toney served as founding executive of Direct Action for Rights & Equality in Providence, Rhode Island, where he led campaigns to prevent winter utility shut-offs.
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