Dean started off by telling the members that he was in Washington, D.C., when the power first started going out, and his wife called asking him what he would do about the problem. Dean joked that he told her his chief concern was that the birthrate would spike. Seriously, Dean is concerned about much more than a baby boom and has read up on the energy situation, to come up with some possible solutions. The issue is money. Two things to know about deregulation, Dean said, are that the companies that bought generating facilities took one third of them off-line for maintenance and that these companies are the same owners of facilities in other states.
Power is kind of like water.
It's a fundamental, you've got to have it. We, as elected officials, we're to blame, Dean said. Some Campbell citizens, he said, have asked him about turning off the street lights at night. Some Lions Club members remarked that such a move could result in more crime, but, Dean said, when New York had its infamous power outage the crime rate dropped dramatically. Dean then offered a solution to the crisis.