A Public Utility for New York’s Hudson Valley – Episode 227 of Local Energy Rules

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Rep. Sarahana Shrestha:
Public benefit state corporations, which is what the Hudson Valley Power Authority would be, have access to tax exempt bonds. They don’t have a profit motive that has to come out of our profits. They are not going to have a perverse incentive where utilities will spend money on unnecessary capital projects because that’s the easiest way to drive up their rates and their earnings for shareholders
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John Farrell:
Already stressed by high rates. Over 8,000 customers of Central Hudson Gas and Electric Corporation in New York were impacted by billing errors that overcharge them sometimes by thousands of dollars. The utility’s performance ranks it among the worst performing in the Eastern United States. According to JD Power and Associates looking for something better. Residents organized around the idea of a publicly owned utility. And representative Sarahana Shrestha representing Assembly District 103 in the Hudson Valley of New York has a bill that would provide just that the Hudson Valley Power Authority Act would take Central Hudson public in order to lower rates, accelerate clean energy deployment, and increase benefits to the communities it serves. Joining me in November, 2024, representative Shrestha provides a deep dive on the solutions public ownership can bring to the problems caused by this private utility. 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. I’m really excited to have with me representative Sarahana Shrestha from New York State, welcome to Local Energy Rules.

Rep. Sarahana Shrestha:
Thank you so much. Very excited to be here. We love talking about local energy.

John Farrell:
Well, I wanted to start by just asking you what got you interested in using legislation to form a publicly owned utility? Do you have a background working on electricity policy or specifically around public ownership?

Rep. Sarahana Shrestha:
The first thing is I grew up in Nepal where the foundational takeaway of my political upbringing was just the importance of public goods. We didn’t have democracy until I was nine years old or so. We had two uprisings for it. The one I witnessed was successful. And then immediately after that we had a prolonged civil war because so much of the country was left out of the public infrastructure, roads, hospitals, a common story with somebody having to be carried on somebody’s back for three days on foot to get to a hospital. So I’ve always been a big believer of what does it mean to provide a solid foundation to the average person. And I moved to the US as a student in graphic design, not in anything to do with politics because half my brain is in the creative world, but I was always involved in politics and I started organizing on climate legislation here in New York state because that is one of the biggest topics that sort of brings everything together.
And I started working on the Build Public Renewables Act, which is a state legislation with the Public Power New York Coalition and Mid-Hudson Valley DSA, of which I’m a member. It was really a great way to learn about how the state legislature works and what are the political roadblocks because I don’t really think there are technical or even financial roadblocks generally speaking. So the Bill Public Renewables Act was focusing on the supply side of the energy and authorizing New York Power Authority to build new renewables that would also invest in community benefits. It was always for me, a step one to energy democracy, the step two being the delivery side, which is what we’re talking about today.

John Farrell:
That’s a great overview of how you came into this, but also a primer. For folks who aren’t familiar with the background of the Build Public Renewables Act, I should just mention that we have another podcast episode with Patrick Robbins who worked, I imagine with you and many others on the passage of that bill and the importance of that. So folks are interested in the sort of broader ecosystem in New York on public renewables. I recommend that, but let’s get right into this specific incident of the discussion about public power, which has to do with the service territory for Central Hudson Electric utility. So I looked this up because it was some information that I saw posted about the effort to take them public, which is that according to JD Power and Associates customer satisfaction with Central Hudson’s electric utility is worse than just about any other electric utility in the Eastern US, maybe with the exception of the one in Maine, which was targeted for the same kind of public takeover. Could you just explain a little bit about why it’s so poorly rated by its customers?

Rep. Sarahana Shrestha:
First of all, I want to say emphatically that it’s not because of the workers. The workers are really working hard, especially I feel a lot of empathy for folks who are trying to do customer service without the support that they need. But really it goes back to two sort of milestones. One is when Central Hudson got bought up by Fortis, which is a Canadian financial holding company, people have this memory of Central Hudson being a much more of a community company, which I think speaks to the fact that there are certain inevitable paths for what happens to utilities, independence, financial health, and who has to own them for them to survive when they’re chasing this profit motive. So it’s no surprise that Fortis and other holding companies like Fortis own many utilities all across the world and they are just held as assets. But in particular for Central Hudson, the other big thing that happened was there was a rollout of a new customer service information system, a software in September of 2021 that created a lot of billing errors that is set to have impacted at least 8,000 customers.
We’re talking about automatic withdrawals of thousands of dollars. We’re talking about wrong bills, which by the way, we’re still working on constituent cases to do with bills that people are just not confident are correct. And that is also the reason why we have a historic level of unpaid bills that Central Hudson is trying to collect through a rate increase. For example, in May of 2023, we had this one constituent just as an example, they saw 80 transactions in one day, 26 bill reversals, 25 actual bills, 17 other charges and 12 credits, and they had absolutely no idea what they were supposed to do with this bill. But there was a big investigation that happened to look at these errors and it closed fairly recently. And one conclusion was that there were many flags and alarms from workers during the development of the software that it was simply not ready.
The training was not there, the quality assurance was not there, but the management sort of just rolled it out haphazardly and it created this multi-year billing fiasco. So that has a lot to do with the frustration with customer satisfaction. And what we were able to arrive at through this process of frustration is people understanding why things are even the way they are. So a lot of our constituents started asking questions like, why is the delivery side of the bill even high? Central Hudson is not even selling the energy itself, it’s just the delivery service. Why is it that even when I use very little energy, the flat rate for delivery is very high? So people started learning about the alternatives for how we could be running the energy system.

John Farrell:
I like to take note as I go along and catch kind of really striking evidence that my guests will give about the issues they’re working on. And I couldn’t keep up with all of the stuff that you were mentioning about just that one customer’s experience with 80 bill transactions in a day, which just I think gives a highlight to how frustrating it must be for customers and the trust that’s broken there at this point of not even being able to believe that the bill that you’re getting is accurate because of so many times that the utility has screwed it up for people. That’s just extraordinary.

Rep. Sarahana Shrestha:
Absolutely. Yeah.

John Farrell:
So you’ve, in order to try to remedy this problem, you’ve introduced the Hudson Valley Power Authority Act, and we’ll have a link in the show notes for folks who want to look at the legislation in detail, but it would put this private and poorly performing company into public hands. So what are some of the changes that you would expect to see from a publicly owned utility that served the Hudson Valley?

Rep. Sarahana Shrestha:
So first things first, I find it useful to look at the history of this debate on who should own energy. And this is not a new fight in New York, for example, we had Governor Charles Evans saying as early as 1907 that New York’s hydropower should be preserved and held for the benefit of the people and should not be surrendered to private interest, which is why we have the New York Power Authority. The first thing that we will see are lower rates. In fact, we do not want to see the transition happen if we do not believe the rates are going to be lower. And one of the primary reasons is if you’re a private corporation, running an energy delivery system is unnecessarily high. This operation is so expensive and so cumbersome that many people believe energy delivery utilities to be a natural monopoly because the fixed costs are so high that competition wouldn’t make sense.
It would possibly actually drive the rates even higher. But why is it unnecessarily costly to do it through a private corporation? They do not have access to low cost financing. If you look at Central Hudson’s Fitch rating to be able to issue their bonds, it’s BBB, and it was recently downgraded. If we compare that to New York Power Authorities rating, they are at aa. And for debt issued in 2023, central Hudson paid an interest rate of as high as six point 17% for a very comparable debt. Nypa paid an interest rate of 3.62%. On top of that public benefit, state corporations, which is what the Hudson Valley Power Authority would be, have access to tax exempt balance. They don’t have a profit motive that has to come out of our profits. They are not going to have a perverse incentive where utilities will spend money on unnecessary capital projects because that’s the easiest way to drive up their rates and their earnings for shareholders.
So right away, lower rates. The other big thing for us is better governance and democracy. It’s not enough. You see direct results from the utility being public, but for us, that’s not really where we want to say that our benefits end. We really want good governance and community oversight. So we have this board of trustees and observatory model through which many more people will have a say in what this utility should do. We have a provision for community benefits including a community fund that the revenues will fund, and we really want to make sure that this is a better deal for workers. So they will have a seat at the table and they will be removed from this political spectacle of a rate case through which they have to fight for the salaries and the benefits and the equipment that they need to be able to do their job.

John Farrell:
I know there’s been other, as we’ve kind of alluded to, activity in New York around public power. Could you talk about whether there are synergies between a new public utility for the Hudson Valley and other recently passed New York utility laws such as the Build Public Renewables Act?

Rep. Sarahana Shrestha:
Absolutely. So in New York, we have this separation between the supply side of energy and the delivery side. So if you’re a private developer or building energy, you’re not doing delivery and delivery is done by utilities that are not allowed to really generate energy for utility scale purposes. So Central Hudson is one of the few corporate monopolies that serve energy over a specific service territory. Now, the Build Public Renewables Act addresses the supply side of the issue because if you look at the wholesale market of where utilities are getting their energy from, it is primarily coming from expensive fossil fuel sources. And in fact, the grid has become dirtier in the recent years. So we want New York Power Authority to ambitiously build local, affordable, publicly owned renewable energy and inject this into the wholesale market so that utilities have the option of sourcing cleaner and cheaper energy.
But we’ve taken it a step further by including specific provisions in our bill on how Hudson Valley Power Authority would interact with New York Power Authority because we want to leverage all of the options we have. So for example, the bill says starting 2025, it authorizes NYPA to supply its renewable energy directly to Hudson Valley Power Authority at locked in preferential rates. New York Power Authority already has a list of clients that they supply low cost energy to, including municipal utilities. And under our bill, this would include the Hudson Valley Power Authority. The other thing is NYPA is great at doing transmission and we have huge roadblocks and challenges with transmission. So we want NYPA. We actually require NYPA to collaborate with Hudson Valley Power Authority to build needed transmission capacity and to coordinate around regional planning to reduce costs for ratepayers. And whenever it’s efficient and practical for NYPA to take on a transmission project in the service territory, we want them to do that. So that synergy is actually very important in making sure that we are keeping costs low and also increasing the quality of our grid.

John Farrell:
That’s great to hear about how the two can work together. And I think a big advantage too, to already have that public power authority just thinking about other public power fights, and that’s one of the issues always talked about is like, well, where did the energy going to come from? Who’s going to pay for that? Lovely to have a situation in which you already have an entity that’s available to help with that.

Rep. Sarahana Shrestha:
And even for the Build Public Renewables Act, coordination within state authorities and state agencies was a big advantage because we have NYSERDA, we have NYSO, and we have Public Service Commission, and the coordination within these entities is so much easier when it’s through another state entity and not with all these scattered private developers.

John Farrell:
So if the Hudson Valley Power Authority Act passes, how would the acquisition of Central Hudson take place? So one thing I’ve learned in observing a lot of public power campaigns and interviewed many people on this podcast is that the acquisition price is always heavily litigated. Do you have a plan for how the public ends up paying a fair price?

Rep. Sarahana Shrestha:
Yes, we do have a plan. We really want to be ahead of the data and the numbers game. And one of those things we’ll include trying to get a pretty independent assessment of how much Central Hudson is actually worth. So that is a big priority of the coalition of advocates who are working right now to pass this bill. And one thing we’ve had to clarify is that taxpayers will not be paying for the acquisition. Nonetheless, we want the acquisition to cost as reasonable and fairly as possible because we want the rates to be low as soon as possible. But we have a rough number that we worked when we were working on the bill. I forget the exact amount, but we know that we’re going to have to get a much more thorough valuation of Central Hudson so that when multiple numbers appear in the conversation, we can make a case for what we think is the right number.
And I think as for litigation, unfortunately corporations have just become very accustomed to by default, legally challenge anything that the state will try to do. We saw this happen with good cause eviction in our state trying to protect people from evictions. We see it when we try to enact Emergency Tenant Protections Act. So we expect that litigation will be part of the process no matter what, but we also want to be as prepared and ready. And we’ve had the advantage, I guess, of learning from many other campaigns that have tried and for the time being have not succeeded. We are in constant communication with campaigns around the country and sometimes even different parts of the world. For example, the observatory model really comes from the Paris Water Authority. So this is bigger than just our district and just Hudson Valley. I think there’s a lot of interest from public power advocates all over the world because we want to see what we can do successfully here.

John Farrell:
I just wanted to add too, I had on the podcast a number of years ago, Scott Hempling, who has done a lot of work. He was serving as an administrative law judge for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and I asked him, he’s worked a lot on utility mergers, which obviously you’ve had experience with Fortis and Central Hudson, but one of the things he and I talked about I thought was so fascinating for its implications in this particular case is he said that essentially the idea of how much a utility is worth is not at all controversial when it comes to their filings, like at the SEC or their accounting and their internal books. You do basically take like, oh, you built this poll 10 years ago. Here was the cost 10 years ago, we’d depreciate it over a certain number of years because it’s been used and now this is how much it’s worth. But it’s only in these acquisition things where the utility will say, actually that poll is worth 10 times what we paid for it. And it just blows my mind that we are essentially, the way Scott described it that has always stuck with me is that we essentially are letting utilities in that moment privatize a public value of the monopoly that they have. Right? Like Central Hudson only exists because it was given this monopoly service territory, the customers paid for the poll.

Rep. Sarahana Shrestha:
Absolutely.

John Farrell:
And the shareholders have made money off of it. So the idea that they then get to market up when they sell it is just, I just can’t get over it. And I hope that the end result of the litigation is that you really do find a fair price for the utility given how ridiculous it is that they’re able to charge a markup at all.

Rep. Sarahana Shrestha:
Absolutely. And we even have an issue with broadband access in our area that is connected to Central Hudson trying to make profit of somebody using their poll to get new broadband lines up.

John Farrell:
Oh my gosh. Well, we know about broadband at the institute. We also have a community broadband networks program that has talked about poll access before, so I’m familiar with that as well. We’re going to take a short break. When we come back, I ask Representative Sarahana Shrestha about the role of labor unions in the discussion, the impacts of the recent election on the effort and how the governance of a new public utility would be organized. You are listening to a local Energy Rules podcast with Representative Sarahana Shrestha representing Assembly District 103 in the Hudson Valley of New York.

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John Farrell:
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:
Well, let’s move on a little bit. So in prior public power campaigns such as the one that was defeated by tens of millions of dollars spent by the utility in Maine, sometimes labor unions have sided with the incumbent utility. And in some places like California, the union labor contracts between that particular local labor union and the utility even include things like a loyalty pledge where the union agrees to essentially side with utility management on political issues. Do you have support from labor unions for the Hudson Valley Power Authority Act?

Rep. Sarahana Shrestha:
So in our experience, it’s really the norm for the workers to not want any change in the ownership. And I think it’s very understandable because there’s two things. One is it is directly connected to their livelihood and they’re stuck in this pickle between the rate payers and the company and the politicians and so on. But at the end of the day, it is their livelihood. So we are very sympathetic to that position. The second thing is trust in government is low. One because there has been such a privatization and outsourcing of public goods that people have sort of forgotten how effective the public sector can be, how innovative it can be, and that is really a cultural problem with our politics and our democracy right now. But the other thing is we only hear about things in the public sector when there’s a problem, and we don’t hear a lot about the successful stories.
Before we started talking about the Build Public Renewables Act, lots of people didn’t even know NYPA existed from my generation, for example. But when we talked about why NYPA is such a unique entity to be able to get us to our climate goals, like people my age became very interested in a state authority, which is a very nerdy thing to be excited about. So we are aware of these points of tension. The approach we are taking is open door policy with the workers. We want to hear all of their concerns. We want to be open to amendments. We’ve already presented a bill that ultimately should this happen and get enacted and so on. We know for a fact that they will be happier. We preserve their right to strike by keeping them as private sector workers. Their pension and their contracts are going to stay in place.
We know they will be removed from this conflict between the rate payers and the company. They will have a seat at the table and the board of trustees, they’ll have two seats on the observatories governing board. We also have strong provisions for prioritizing the transition of workers who might be losing their job due to changes in the energy sector banning the hiring of contract workers so that they just to avoid paying union wages and so on. So we’ve presented a starting point that we would love to have long conversations with the workers about because we understand the anxiety that they might be feeling, and sometimes we run into workers when we’re knocking doors and there is genuine curiosity among the rank and file members, and we really, really appreciate that curiosity and want to give it all of the attention that it needs. So we’re just hoping for continued good faith conversation from our end, and we are completely accepting and sympathetic towards any anxiety that they might be feeling.

John Farrell:
Yeah. One of the issues that I’ve heard about with the public takeover, I think I heard this from the advocates in Maine was the first time I came across it was that due to the conservative Supreme Court’s Janus decision, it’s stripped away some labor protections for unions representing public workers that are still in place for private sector workers. Do you know if that plays a role here in the position of labor unions? I know in fact in Maine that that’s one of the reasons they settled on the public takeover was actually it was facilitated as a public takeover, but it was going to be a cooperatively owned utility. I think to maybe avoid some of that problem, it sounds like you’ve already taken some steps as well, but has that come up? Is that something that people were talking about as a part of it, or were you just going into this thinking? We’re not concerned about what the Supreme Court says or what those differences are. We’re just going to look at how do we assure people who are union workers that their jobs are going to be preserved and their rights preserved?

Rep. Sarahana Shrestha:
Yeah, we are very much invested in making sure that we have done everything on our part to make sure that the workers are not going to be negatively harmed. And the idea of retaining them as private sector workers came from a task force report that came out of Long Island actually, because in Long Island they have a sort of bad public private partnership between the Long Island Power Authority and PSEG. So they’ve been trying to figure out what is the correct path for them. And the task force, which was a neutral task force, recommended actually that they should go fully public instead of pursuing this public, private or a fully private path. And one of the suggestions that came out of it was to preserve the workers right to strike and so on by keeping them as private sector workers, which we see as something we have to do now, even though we support ultimately the public sector workers right to strike as well. And there is a separate bill for that, but that might have to be a separate fight and for another time, and we don’t necessarily want that to be the reason that the workers feel negatively about this particular bill.

John Farrell:
That’s really helpful. I’m going to take a little pivot here. We all felt a pivot I think a couple of weeks ago, but did the election results impact your legislative plans? For example, were there any federal approvals that you need to execute the takeover or has it changed the dynamic in the state legislature?

Rep. Sarahana Shrestha:
So not for this bill, many other things are going to see an impact, especially in cases where we need a huge federal investment. But this bill actually is a perfect example of what the state can do regardless of what’s happening at the federal level and what the state should do to address affordability concerns from New Yorkers right now, which are very high and very real, and utility bill is one of those bills that you cannot predict how much it’s going to be from month to month. In fact, that was why so many people were not paying their bills. We had a small business owner whose bill was in the thousands of dollars, and when we looked into it, it was corrected to be just a few hundred dollars. So New York actually has the power to do things like this that would have a direct positive impact on our constituents without being held up by what is happening at the federal level.
And those are the things that we should be moving along on. But even when we look at the Inflation Reduction Act, I think for the first time we have direct payment provisions for public entities because I think there’s a consensus coming around that the private sector is not going to be enough to deliver on some of the crises that we are dealing with. And I think we’re going to see that consensus built in housing, in energy in schools. So we want to be a step ahead and lead with this at the state and not have to wait around.

John Farrell:
I wanted to ask you about the proposed governance structure. So when you have a city owned utility, it’s typically governed by the city council or a commission appointed by the city council. The proposed governing structure here has a board of trustees, which has a number of members appointed by the governor, the Senate, and the Assembly. You also have this observatory that you mentioned before. And I guess I just wanted to preface this question. It was helpful that you brought up Long Island because that’s what I had in mind when I was thinking of this question. The Long Island Power Authority used to be public, but the members were appointed by the governor and were not local to Long Island. You have the Tennessee Valley Authority. Similarly, another big public utility. Its members are appointed by the president and approved by the US Senate not representing local interests. And in both of those cases, there were big problems from that in terms of the operation and its accountability to local folks. So talk to me a little bit about how this governing board and the observatory work together and how you’re able to make sure that people who ought to be represented by their utility are getting represented.

Rep. Sarahana Shrestha:
Yeah, so there are a few differences. One is the politics of Hudson Valley is very different from Long Island, and I’ve learned that firsthand from being in the assembly for two years. So far it’s very different politics. And the other thing is Central Hudson has sort of this territory that is a mix of some counties are fully represented in the service territory and others are only partially represented, and I believe there are about 85 local governments represented. So the municipal very local model would obviously not make sense because it’s not a gigantic service territory, but at the same time, it’s big and we don’t want to break up the service territory because it is actually cheaper if you keep it the same and in the future maybe expand rather than break it up. And I’ve learned that it also makes a difference in when the worth of the company is assessed that when you redraw the borders, the valuation can actually go higher.
So how do we represent this big area that even within my district, the towns and the localities have very different dynamics, very different types of people who live in them. So our solution is to start with a board of trustees that has a mix of appointments. We democratize it a little bit by making sure it’s not just the governor’s appointments, but it’s also the Senate and the Assembly. And because so few senators and assembly members are represented in the service territory, we really want to use the legislature’s appointments to put forward the local voice and the local choice of who should be the appointment. And I think we can have a similar impact on the governor’s selections, but maybe less so, but still ours would be four and hers would be two. So it still gives us room for representation. The other thing is the observatory is where there’s going to be a lot of local representation, so elected county representatives, representatives from local academic institutions because we also want to have a very intentional connection to our academic resources in the area, expertise and so on.
Then we have members from the union in this observatory board, and this body will have a budget to help the governing board achieve its goals in various areas. So like community participation, transparency, research, accountability and monitoring and local projects and so on. And two members of this observatory will also be on the board of trustees. So the oversight body will really be the more active space where a lot of local concerns are getting hashed out, and then that is going to get reported to the board of trustees so that the decisions that they make is really based on what this community body is saying.

John Farrell:
That’s super helpful in terms of clarifying how that works in the interaction of the two and really novel. What led you to the Paris water utility to find this observatory model?

Rep. Sarahana Shrestha:
Talking to lots of people who have been involved in public ownership of a utility in any form or capacity, and just making sure that we have really considered everything that people have tried and not reinvent anything that doesn’t need to be reinvented, but also not repeat any mistakes. And we really feel there is such a strong and very energetic community of public power advocates or public utility advocates across the country, and we are all very excited. I recently went on climate delegation to Norway and Denmark to talk about how do we do a just green transition? And I was surprised to learn that this issue of public ownership and seeing the private involvement in our energy sector as an obstacle to a just transition was not limited to countries like the United States that in fact, even in places like Denmark and Norway, they’re having very similar conversations, which gave me confidence that we are trying to solve the right problem.

John Farrell:
Yeah, I can imagine. That’s actually fascinating. I did some work especially on denmark’s energy system years ago and was always thinking like, well, they’ve solved for this. So many, almost all of their utilities are cooperatively owned. But the cooperative ownership is very distant, I guess I would say, in terms of the size of the utilities. So I guess in some ways it’s not too surprising when you think about the input from local customers, local owners. I just wanted to mention too, since you were talking about this opportunity to learn from many others, ILSR actually hosts a monthly call with public power advocates, mostly pulling together people who are working on municipal campaigns across the country for that kind of mutual learning. So if people are listening and they’re interested in public power and wanting to learn more about it, that has been a really great space for people to just come together and learn from one another, make connections, ask each other questions. So anyway, I just wanted to throw that out there, but let me ask you before we wrap up, what are the next steps for the bill for the Hudson Valley Power Authority Act?

Rep. Sarahana Shrestha:
So because we represent an area that is quite scattered and lots of local governments, pockets of density, a lot of rural areas, we have some fairly decent sized cities like City of Kingston, Poughkeepsie, Newburgh, and Beacon in the service territory. So we want to do a lot of field knocking doors, town halls, talking to people about this bill. We’ve done quite a bit of that in our district, but now advocates are trying to do it all over the service territory, and I’m very excited to play a supportive role in that in any capacity I can. We started collecting names in support of this bill on Labor Day, and we have, I think about 2,500 names, and I was really surprised that even very politically unmotivated people, for example, people who are very cynical or people who don’t want to talk about the election at all, still wanted to put their name down in support of this bill because this is what they care about.
They want to see their bills reduced. They want the profit removed from energy. It was not uncommon for us to talk to a Trump voter who was very down to support this bill. So speaking of the recent election, I think one thing that we all have to be serious about is organizing towards a true democracy, bringing people back into being participants of our democracy because our democracy really is in a crisis, and the more people feel like it’s not even worth participating, the more trouble we are in and the more likely we are to elect right-wing governments. So we are very cognizant of the fact that building ground support for this bill has two purposes. One is to bring people back into the political process. Two is to really create the kind of force we need to counter any lobbying and spending that’s going to come from the utility side because this is not a statewide bill, and it’s talking about just a few counties. We want to get the local electeds on board. We want to answer their questions. We want to make sure that they understand what their constituents are going through because those problems are usually being handled through the state and the federal offices rather than the very local offices. So we really want to create a strong foundation of support so that we are ready for the fight and we’re going to fight for however long it takes.

John Farrell:
So if you were at a door right now and you ring my doorbell and I open the door, what’s your 30 seconds? Talk to me about this thing that we’re working on.

Rep. Sarahana Shrestha:
So this is how it usually goes. I say the things that people need have been over privatized. Everything is out of reach, and it’s become really hard right away. People will be like, absolutely, you’re speaking my language. Then as soon as I mentioned Central Hudson and the rates going up, they don’t even want to hear the full thing. They’re like, where do I sign? But I do try to make sure that they’re getting as much information as possible as they’re putting their name down. The other instance is people are very curious about this bill, but because it is a novel thing for many folks, they want to learn more. So we have a pamphlet that has a FAQ. So lots of people wanted to take the pamphlet even if they’re not ready to put their name down. But the other thing is, honestly, people were much more excited to talk about this bill than they were about the election.
The election was dispiriting and demobilizing for a lot of people. They were stressed out about what was going to happen either way, whatever side they were on, but people want to hear about solutions. We also got a lot of surprise reactions like, oh, I did not even know this was possible. And for them to learn that there was actually a bill that is introduced in the Senate, introduced in the assembly is in the committees. So people are also interested in the capacity of what the state government could do and how they can be involved. But we really want to pull people out of cynicism and get them to think about what they can do, because I think that’s the very exciting aspect of all these grassroots types of campaigns.

John Farrell:
Well representatives just thank you so much for coming on Local Energy Rules to talk about the Hudson Valley Power Authority Act and giving people hope that there are solutions, public solutions to the really thorny problems.

Rep. Sarahana Shrestha:
Absolutely. We all need hope right now.

John Farrell:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Local Energy Rules about the Hudson Valley Power Authority Act. With Representative Sarahana Shrestha representing Assembly District 103 in the Hudson Valley of New York. On the show page, look for a link to the legislation as well as several news stories and a specific website about the bill. Also on ILSR’s website, you can find numerous podcasts about public power, including our six part series on the promise and peril of publicly owned power. My interview with Scott Hempling about utility mergers and valuation, and my interview with Patrick Robbins of Public Power New York about the Build Public Renewables Act.
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.