The Town That Could Spark a Public Power Revolution — Episode 243 of Local Energy Rules

Miron Carney:
I want those cities to remember — there is very little consequence for that current utility operator to use deceptive information and tactics. And at the same time, the city is prohibited from spending any money to influence an elections outcome.

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John Farrell:
The path to public ownership of utility companies is littered with failures at the ballot box. So I was pleasantly surprised to find out that voters in Slayton, a town of about 2000 people in southwestern Minnesota overwhelmingly chose to take over their electric utility earlier in 2025. How did it happen and why did the citizens of Slayton want to go public? Miron Carney, Slayton mayor and longtime resident, joined me in July, 2025 to talk about the motivation for public power and what it means for this Minnesota community. I’m John Farrell, director of the Energy Democracy Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and this is Local Energy Rules, a podcast about monopoly power, energy democracy, and how communities can take charge to transform the energy system.

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John Farrell:
Miron, welcome to Local Energy Rules.

Miron Carney:
Well, thanks John. I really appreciate you inviting me on.

John Farrell:
I like to start off by asking all my guests to share some of their backstory and I have to say in looking you up on Google, I found you have a very interesting resume. How did all of these disparate interests lead to you becoming the mayor of Slayton, Minnesota?

Miron Carney:
Well, John, my wife Cheryl, opened a beauty shop here in Slayton in 1994. I started working also a couple of years later full-time in Slayton as an advertising sales manager to locally owned newspaper group. We soon found ourselves very active in the Slayton community, various organizations and causes like the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, our church, community Thanksgiving meals, the local chamber of commerce, and I’m sure there’s a long list of things I’ve long forgotten. Well the building we rented for Cheryl’s Beauty shop had a very leaky roof with little prospect of getting our landlord to fix it, so we started shopping for a building that we could purchase for her business. We looked at the building where her shop is currently located today, but I was surprised that it included a house that originally had been built as a church in 1880. Now while our kids were getting a little more involved in school and other activities, and both Cheryl and I working in Slayton and we thought it made sense for us to move to Slayton and so we moved into the old 1880 Church in 1998.
Then in 2000, I somehow ended up being elected to the city council on a write-in and probably to do with all of my civic involvement here in town. And then in 2010 I ran for mayor and ever since then, the people just keep reelecting me. I don’t know if you want me to go too much farther into my professional endeavors, but I’ll give you some here. Cheryl and I, we met in the late 1980s in Los Angeles. After our son was born, we moved to rural Chandler, Minnesota and lived out on a farm. Cheryl worked a number of jobs at places like bakeries and a meat packing place while I completed my bachelor’s degrees in marketing and small business administration. Our daughter was born several weeks before an F5 tornado, erased both the towns of Chandler and Lake Wilson along with damaging many rural homes and farms.
Well Cheryl, as I said earlier, opened her beauty shop in ’94 shortly after we had bought the building in Slayton, and then we also opened a bookstore in 1998 that we operated until 2016. After that, we went into the garden center business and also do market gardening on one of our farms. We’ve developed quite a number of residential rental properties and owned them over the years and sold them. I’ve had several other business ventures ranging from a Y2K company, a web-building company back before the days of Monster and things like that. I also worked for Johnson Publishing starting in 1996, and I worked with that company up until last Thursday when they went out of business, and for 20 years I was a digital pre-press technician, retired in 2021 and made ministry in the United Methodist Church as my retirement part-time gig.

John Farrell:
So Miron, what I invited you here to talk about is this proposed takeover, city takeover of the electric and the gas utility, both utility companies. I’d love to start with looking at the outcome first and then we’ll come back to the process, but what do you expect to get from the city takeover of the electricity gas service from the current utility companies

Miron Carney:
With the electric utility, our main goal was to improve customer reliability and also public safety aspects. The city’s acquisition of the gas company will also make it possible for new residential and commercial customers to connect to their system. That’s kind of the main two things that motivated this endeavor.

John Farrell:
Why do you think it’s possible to get some of these benefits, like reliability, maybe lower cost, et cetera, by switching providers?

Miron Carney:
Well, in the prior century, Northern States Power was the electric company serving Slayton. They had an excellent record for reliability and responsiveness to customers and public safety requests. Xcel Energy took over operations around the turn of the century. Since then, little capital maintenance and improvements have been made to their systems until this most recent year when Minnesota’s public Utility Commission compelled Xcel to address the reliability challenges with the Slayton grid in terms of safety, the response time has not been acceptable. In one situation, our fire department was fighting a house fire needing the electricity turned off to that property. It took over a half a day for Xcel to respond and get the power shut off and other delays responding to broken poles and downed wires continued to be public safety concerns. Lowering costs will turn out to be an ancillary bonus to our motives. Now with the natural gas utility, Northwest Natural Gas, the city saw an opportunity with them with both parties where the offerings could be improved for everyone.
Northwest Natural Gas is considered, in Minnesota, a small utility provider, so decisions on rates, they’re local decisions that involve the local community working directly with the utility owner. That said, the gas company is at their statutory limits in terms of the number of customers that they can serve as defined under Minnesota state law. If they go above that, then they become regulated just like Xcel and obviously for them they’re much, much, much smaller than a company like Xcel Energy and they also lose that local control with the people. They haven’t — and they being Northwest Natural Gas — been able to take on any new customers for most of the decade anywhere in their system, not just in Slayton. This acquisition will make it possible for new residential and commercial customers to connect to Slayton because all of the customers in Slayton will then become one customer since the city of Slayton will be the retailer and it opens up opportunities for them elsewhere in their system.

John Farrell:
Oh, interesting. You’ve already kind of addressed this a little bit in the fact that it seems like these two takeovers are rather different. So the gas utility essentially said, Hey, can you take over? This would allow us to continue to expand service, and I guess I didn’t understand the mechanism before, but by consolidating your city customers into kind of one customer as a distribution utility, it seems like the electric utility, Xcel Energy, seems more resistant, so I expect that it did not initiate this process. You talked a little bit about why the city is interested in doing so, some of the reliability issues and responsiveness. How did this plan to take over the utility come about? Was it sparked by the request from the gas utility and people were thinking, oh, hey, we actually have another utility and we’re kind of unhappy with them, or was there some other spark for that consideration?

Miron Carney:
Well, taking over the gas utility, we had talked about this at the city level because we’ve been struggling with getting new customers connected. And the gas utility, they’re the ones who then began the dialogue. Taking over the gas utility, as I said earlier, was going to benefit both the Northwest Natural Gas and it would give the city the ability to add new customers in Slayton. The city has a new housing development for instance. People who build new houses in that development, only if they were existing natural gas customers could they connect their homes to natural gas. Anybody who had not been connected wasn’t allowed to connect because of the moratorium.

John Farrell:
I work with some folks who are really excited about building decarbonization using heat pumps instead of fossil fuels for building heating. I know in Minnesota it’s a very challenging environment. It gets particularly cold. I guess I’m just kind of curious if there was any exploration of that for your new housing development or maybe you did explore it and it was prohibitively expensive. What did that look like if that came up at all?

Miron Carney:
Well, you hit on a lot of that, John. We live in a little too harsh of environment to 100% rely on being able to heat homes with electric heat pumps. They can provide the vast majority of energy needed to heat and cool a home, but when we get those Minnesota winters when it’s 30 below zero and 40 below zero, and even not quite that cold, the electric heat pump, even if it’s a ground source heat pump would struggle tremendously to keep homes comfortable. So natural gas is probably the best alternative to make for that ancillary or supplementary energy source.

John Farrell:
It’s interesting. I have some personal experience. I actually just replaced my 25-year-old gas furnace in the last six months. We do have an air source heat pump, but we chose to use a gas furnace as a backup both because it was going to be more expensive to operate it if we didn’t do that, but also more expensive upfront. So both the upfront cost and the maintenance cost. I had thought ground source was different, but I don’t want to get into a technology discussion with you because I’m very interested actually in getting onto the Xcel energy stuff. So why don’t we head over that way and tell me a little bit about how the town started down that path of considering taking over the electric system?

Miron Carney:
One of the things that really made us talk at earnest about it was the utility franchise agreement had came up and oddly, I’ve been in city government so long and Slayton, this is the second time I’ve seen it come up.

John Farrell:
Wow.

Miron Carney:
The first time though was at the transition from Northern States Power to Xcel and service was good. Rates were the lowest in the region through Northern States Power, even lower than the local cooperatives. Xcel’s loss of revenue system-wide has been kind of a sticking point for them in our negotiations. It really isn’t an issue to all be honest, if you want to look at Xcel as this large power company. Just in Minnesota in a matter of weeks, Xcel’s growth in new customers would more than replace all the lost revenue from the Slayton grid. It seems the greater concern with Xcel is that Slayton is going to invent the path by which other communities can use to take over other Xcel territories. I really understand. That’s the most I know we’ve been talking with people in in Decorah about what we’re experiencing. They have a bit of a different regulatory environment with their public utilities there than we do in Minnesota, but many of the rhetorical processes match in both situations. So I know also the National League of Cities has been in contact with our city because they’re interested on a national level. I’m pretty confident once this gets resolved in a year or so, there’s going to be probably a bunch of other communities, not just in Minnesota but around the country taking a real serious look at municipalizing their utilities.

John Farrell:
It’s so interesting to think about how Xcel is perceiving this not as a threat by itself. Like you said, that the number of customers they would lose is really a small fraction, and that makes sense. I mean, there have been a lot of attempts to municipalize Minneapolis a little over 10 years ago. Boulder, Colorado infamously was in the process for a decade and none of those ended up with a separation. So I think the fact that you had a successful ballot initiative, which I hope to ask you a little bit about more later, I think really is a striking difference.
I want to ask you a little bit about the sort of how the operation of the grid will go. It sounds like your plan is to take over ownership of the electricity grid, but then essentially just to contract with the nearby Rural Electric Cooperative in order to provide the service. Right, so you don’t have to invent your own utility, find your own utility managers, not that those people are not out there, but it sounds like you have a fairly simple mechanism by which to run this local grid once you own it.

Miron Carney:
Yeah. The arrangement the city has for wholesale power purchasing along with operations and maintenance will go to Noble’s Cooperative Electric, and it happens to be that their headquarters are right here in Slayton.

John Farrell:
Oh, that’s nice. So you do get someone not only who is better aligned with your needs, but also right there in town.
One of the questions I had about that arrangement is if the plan goes through, will Slayton electricity customers be members of the cooperative as other members of the Nobles cooperative, or is this something similar to, like you mentioned with Northwest Natural Gas, you’re sort of aggregating all the people in Slayton account as one customer. How will that work with regard to the cooperative membership or is it not a membership arrangement at all? It’s just a contractual arrangement that for them to provide electricity services?

Miron Carney:
Yeah, great question, John. When the plan goes through Slayton’s rate payers will be customers of Slayton Municipal Utility. Noble’s Cooperative Electric will be a vendor that’s providing services to Slayton Municipal Utilities.

John Farrell:
One of the things that I’ve found really interesting in reading about the takeover is that like most contested utility takeovers, Xcel Energy has quoted you a price to buy them out that is substantially above your own assessment, your own community’s assessment, of the value of the local electricity system. How will that purchase price ultimately be determined, and do you think you can keep it under the authorized amount that was in your ballot initiative, which if I remember correctly, was still quite a bit above what you thought it was worth, but had some cushion for that negotiation?

Miron Carney:
Well, this might sound like a lawyerly answer here, but Xcel Energy and the city had reached a non-binding agreement on asset valuation and changing over the power grid to reconnect. Repowering, I think is a term that they used. The sticking point in the negotiation has been over lost revenue. Now, this lost revenue piece is usually used to address what they call stranded investment, and this is when a city takes over another utility operator’s territory. Stranded investment can be a harsh challenge for small co-op electrics. An example might be a co-op might lose 20% of their customers to municipal utility, and that co-op was counting on revenue from those lost customers to pay down a debt on a substation. That would be a place where the municipal utility would be obliged in making payments over a period of time to that utility. Xcel is not suffering any stranded investment despite what they’re saying. Since the city is taking over the entire system, there’s no little crumbs to deal with. Regarding Xcel’s substation, Noble’s co-op will be purchasing it. Nobles had long been planning to construct a new substation of their own, but the purchasing Xcel’s turned out to be a better opportunity and option for them. I’m still confident the deal will go through. How it will be structured is yet to be determined. For now, it’s in the hands of the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission and we anticipate a way forward by June, 2026.

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John Farrell:
We are going to take a short break. When we come back, I ask Miron how much the utility did to oppose the takeover, where the decision goes from here, and what advice he has for other cities considering a public takeover. You’re listening to a local Energy Rules podcast with Miron Carney, mayor of Slayton, Minnesota.
Hey, thanks for listening to Local Energy Rules. We’re so glad you’re here. If you like what you’ve heard, please help other folks find us by giving the show a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify — five stars if you think we’ve earned it. As a bonus, I’ll gladly read your review aloud on the show if it includes an energy related joke or pun. Now, back to the program.

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John Farrell:
So I have seen, in the past, utilities spend ridiculous sums of money to stop takeovers. I think in a lot of the public power fights that ILSR has followed, and then I’ve covered on this podcast, which includes Decorah, Boulder across the state of Maine. The utilities would spend millions of dollars somewhere on the order of 10 to 40 times more than the community was able to afford. Has Xcel done a lot of public lobbying or advertising to oppose the takeover? Did they spend money to oppose the ballot referendum when that took place?

Miron Carney:
Oh, definitely. Xcel has been resistant to the takeover from the start. Xcel did direct mailings, ran advertising to influence the voters on the referendum. At the same time, the city’s prohibited from spending any money to impact an election, yet the referendum did pass with the plurality.

John Farrell:
Just to follow up on that though, I think I saw that the results of the referendum were something like somewhere between 60 and 70% of folks did vote in favor of separation, which is pretty remarkable because we’ve generally seen sometimes not very close votes where the cities have failed in that goal. So that is impressive.
So what is the next step here? You have the ballot initiative that passed. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it was earlier this year. It sounds like things are before the Public Utilities Commission at this point, but if you could just give a little bit more detail in terms of what’s coming up next.

Miron Carney:
Yeah. With the Xcel takeover, we will be engaged with the PUC process by submitting and responding questions throughout this process. Right now, it’s in their hands as far as the natural gas, the city’s in the process of finalizing how it’s going to operate, Northwest Natural Gas will be a vendor for Slayton Municipal Utilities, and they’re going to be providing the wholesale purchasing, transportation, and operation. I learned a lot of terminology and utilities. One that I wasn’t ready for was a natural gas transportation, and I guess it just makes sense. It just refers to the pipeline, but there’s a cost to operating that.

John Farrell:
One of the things that I find so interesting about this entire process is how in both cases you have a local vendor that’s going to provide not only the wholesale commodity, either gas or electricity, you’re also contracting out with vendors to run the system who already have experience, who already have experience locally. I think certainly the incumbent utilities often talk about the fact that where are you going to find the people to run the energy system, and it’s just interesting to hear you explain just so matter of factly, like, oh, well, we just have these people here who are going to do it for us, or we’re going to contract with the folks who were in charge before and we’re going to run it, but they’re just going to do it on a contract with us. So to me, I guess really highlights how little disruption you can have. Even though this ownership transition is taking place, it’s like, oh, but it’s the same services and sometimes even the same people that will provide them.
Miron, what advice would you have for other cities that are similarly dissatisfied with the utility service? I mean, you talked about one of them already that you’ve been in conversation with Decorah where they’ve had two votes now one very close and one a little less close with an effort to take over their electric utility. What advice would you give them in terms of how they approach this process or the ballot initiative process or any of the steps that are so complicated?

Miron Carney:
I think there’s three things that any city needs to take into consideration. First off, cities need to determine if there is a way to operate their own utility. If a city isn’t already operating a utility, they likely don’t have the wherewithal to operate a utility. The city will need to partner with someone. Now, partnering might be like what Slaytons doing with a local co-op, but it’s also an opportunity, which I’ve seen in other places, where they partner with a neighboring municipal utility.
The second thing you need to determine before you even start thinking about having a referendum or anything is that is to determine if the business is feasible. You need to answer questions like how much the utilities assets are worth. What will it cost to connect to the system? Are the assets suffering from deferred maintenance and what will those updates cost? How much will power purchasing, operating and maintenance cost, and what revenue will the system generate? With that information, the city can then determine if the venture is sound from a business aspect and if the city has the capacity to sell the bonds to take over the purchase.
And then the third thing, the city needs to be honest and transparent with its voters. Slayton held a number of in-person public information forums that were also made available online, and we invited Xcel to be there to make comments and answers some questions. Now, if the current system operator in another community is anything like Xcel, be ready for that company to hit the customers with advertising and direct mailings and opposition to the municipalization of that utility, and I want those cities to remember there is very little consequence for that current utility operator to use deceptive information and tactics, and at the same time, the city is prohibited from spending any money to influence an elections outcome. In Slaytons case, having Xcel at those farms worked in the city’s favor. Their statements and question responses only work to enforce Slayton’s positions. I don’t think that was what Xcel had intended to do, but the facts ended up supporting Slayton’s position.

John Farrell:
I wanted to come back to something you mentioned in the sort of second of the three things here about determining if the business is feasible, and I imagine this has come up in your conversation with folks in Decorah, which, as we covered, really struggled to get some of that information from the utility, though a lot of times in this case you want to say to the utility, okay, can you tell us how many substations are within city boundaries, how many poles? That kind of thing. Maybe that’s easy enough at the scale of Slayton to just go out and look around, and maybe that’s even feasible on a larger scale as well with larger cities. I guess I’m just curious, what data were you able to get? Did you have barriers in terms of getting data? Was Xcel allowing you access to information or did you somehow come about that some other way?

Miron Carney:
Well, Xcel, we did make a number of requests to them in terms of value of assets, driving value of assets like any other business endeavor, the cost of putting in the assets, less depreciation. But we also hired a consultant to come around and do an inventory of all things electric utility: poles, wires, transformers. I’m not the expert, but there’s a lot of pieces in there and I think a lot of people kind of understand what those are, and that consultant did come up with a valuation for the assets. What was interesting was the number that Xcel gave us compared to the city’s consultant’s estimate was almost a million dollars less than what our consultant thought it was worth. Part of it was the level of depreciation was even more depreciated than our consultant anticipated.

John Farrell:
Wow, that’s fascinating and unusual that that would’ve happened. Do you feel like that will make it easier ultimately then in the proceeding at the Public Utilities Commission to reach an agreement? I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a situation which the utility’s estimates were actually lower. Does that mean that they’re asking price is lower or are they still asking for more money and justifying it in some other way?

Miron Carney:
No, the non-binding asset valuation that we reached an accord on was pretty much what Xcel had on their balance sheet. One thing that’s happening right now, as I said earlier, is they’re upgrading the system right now replacing poles and things like that. One of the lost revenue things that worked in our favor we felt is that because Xcel had not made any meaningful capital improvements to the system in a quarter century, they really didn’t have any investment to lose. The funny thing is that of course, when they sell it, the lower the value of the asset that they lose, means that when they calculate their dividend, they’ve lost less assets, so they’ll end up with a greater revenue to asset ratio and that will drive their dividends, so that’s to their advantage. Also. The other thing though, that now with all of the upgraded poles and wires and transformers, whatnot, it’s increasing the value of the system.
Now that’s work that the city had planned on paying for after the acquisition, so it really doesn’t change the cost model that we had for taking over the system. What it does do, however though, is it decreases their position for claiming that the lost revenue model, and I don’t remember the math on this, one of our consultants that was working on this was a former Xcel employee who is very familiar with their internal asset calculations and methodology. At the PUC, the challeng is I said that number that they’re proposing had two problems with it. One was they were asking for a lump sum upfront, which that has never occurred. The other piece was that it far exceeded any rationales that we were able to come up with. We gave them our number, and as our high school math teachers would’ve told us, our algebra teachers would said, show your homework. We showed the homework. We showed them how we derived at what we believed was a reasonable and respectable valuation. Xcel up at this point has been very resistant to share any of their methodologies on how they calculated that number, so that’s what the PUC is going to be chewing on.

John Farrell:
Just one specific thing on lost revenue, and I know this gets way in the weeds, but I just have to ask it. There is in Minnesota statute, that lost revenue piece is a specific part of Minnesota state law that I think was actually added sometime after the original statutes about municipalization. You actually gave a really good explanation before of how it could impact, say, a cooperative that’s made a big investment and now a city is taking over their territory that they were counting on those customers to help them pay for a new substation for example. You may have already answered my question here, but I would always have thought that the sort of asset valuation would capture any kind of issue related to lost revenue, but it sounds like in that circumstance, if you’re just taking the customers and you’re not buying this new substation, that’s sort of the case that this was derived for. Did the expiration of the franchise agreement in your mind have anything to do with that? I guess I’ve heard some people say the franchise agreement is the end term of when a utility can really expect to continue serving a community. I know that’s not legally how it works. I don’t know if I have a super organized question there, but interested in how that legal requirement ended up interfacing here, and if you feel like the franchise expiration had anything to do with how it factored into the numbers and the evaluation discussion?

Miron Carney:
I don’t know what came first. Well, what did come first was the cities. We were discussing concerns over reliability and the public safety things that truly came first, and then when the franchise agreement came up, that just kind of, you could say, galvanized our desire to really get going on it because we just felt that, well, we’re not going to approve this franchise agreement.

John Farrell:
Back on when we were talking about the politics of the ballot campaign, you mentioned Xcel had did some advertising, sent some mailers. I still think I have a copy of my full color mailer about Minneapolis’s campaign that Xcel sent to everybody, and you mentioned that the city can’t do any spending on an election campaign. Was there a supportive Vote Yes campaign that did raise some money and do some work, or did you feel like, or did that not emerge and it really was mostly just those public forums that did the work of giving people the information they needed to make a decision?

Miron Carney:
Well, I believe the public forum and then also we got a lot of assistance; I can’t understate the reporting that the local newspapers did on it. It had a lot of deep in the weeds details that I know some people want, some people don’t want it, but that really helped our case. There were a number of citizens that were very vocal about it, but I wouldn’t say to the point where they were taking out ad space or doing anything like that that extended to people who were willing to just explain it to their neighbors. And I know there was a number of people that went as far as getting yard signs encouraging people to vote.

John Farrell:
Miron, thank you so much for taking the time to walk me through what you’ve been dealing with in Slayton and the thoughtful process the city’s gone through in considering its utility takeovers. Is there anything that you have thought of or that I didn’t think to ask you about this effort that you think people who are, particularly people who are interested in public power, who are folks that we work with might want to know about in terms of their own work?

Miron Carney:
Well, I’m not sure if this applies in all cases. There’s always these variable details that are different in every community, but one of the things that I can speak to is how our decision making was steered here in Slayton. Slayton is a community of right around 2000 people, and as I put the Nobles Co-op has their office here. There are few people in the community that don’t know each other, and that includes all the way up and down regardless of what people do. I’ve known for quite a number of years the co-op manager at Noble’s Co-op, we’d attend friends birthday parties and graduation parties and things like together, and there were a lot of conversations that were held with not only with the co-op manager, but also with the linemen who work. And this is a thing that really gave us a lot of insight into, you could say, the nuts and bolts of how the system worked because while Xcel operates and owns the utility in Slayton, the utility companies, they have a lot of interoperability, understanding of each other’s systems where they can come to the mutual aid to the other company when it’s needed, and that really aided us in understanding and coming to our first agreement.
I know I’m excited having this move forward. I talked about the slow response issue in public safety and whatnot. Well, Xcel is no different than many other big companies. They keep squeezing the resources, trying to get more service out of less people, and then also that’s coupled with we have a worker shortage. We currently have one lineman who happens to live in the Slayton area, which is awesome, but he covers at least the four county area in southwestern Minnesota. That’s a lot of geography for one person. We have five linemen that work for Nobles Co-op that live in Slayton. Three of them are firefighters, so I feel really good if we have a scenario where there’s a house fire or something like that that we can get the immediate response.

John Farrell:
Yeah, almost a twofer there. You’ve got them. They might already be on site for the fire and they might know something about the electricity system. Yeah. Wow. What a difference in terms of just having that local resource. Well, Miron, thank you again for taking the time to chat with me about this. It’s so fascinating that as something that I follow pretty closely that this came completely under the radar. Somebody I ended up reading about it in the Decorah News where folks there I think were excited about the success that you had had in changing utility ownership, but just clearly involves a very thoughtful process and also I think benefits greatly from your longtime residence and knowledge and connections with people in the community. Thanks for coming on today and chatting with me about it.

Miron Carney:
And I think something that might be useful for your listeners, I’ll email you this link, but to put in the show notes is Minnesota Municipal Utility Association Newsletter also did a really good piece on this Lake Municipalization Electric a couple months ago.

John Farrell:
Oh, perfect. That would be lovely. I would definitely include that in the show notes. Miron, thank you so much.

Miron Carney:
Yeah, you keep doing what you’re doing, John. I really respect and appreciate the information that you’re sharing with people.

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John Farrell:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Local Energy Rules with Miron Carney, mayor of Slayton, Minnesota, about their successful vote to take their electric utility public.
On the show page, look for a link to news coverage of the city’s takeover process and the article Miron mentioned from the Minnesota Municipal Utility Association. We’ll also have links to ILSR’s six-part podcast series on campaigns for publicly owned power, our newly released handbook on public power advocacy, and several conversations with leaders of other cities that have made the attempt, including Decorah, Iowa. Local Energy Rules is produced by myself and Ingrid Behrsin with editing provided by audio engineer Drew Birschbach. Tune back into Local Energy Rules every two weeks to hear how we can take on concentrated power to transform the energy system. Until next time, keep your energy local and thanks for listening.