Utility Millions Take Down Popular Measure — Episode 197 of Local Energy Rules

I was just reaching out to candidates, being like, you need a young idealistic person to work for you. I’m your girl. And Montana is one of the few states that elects their public service commissioners. And so my first job out of college, outside of the few weeks I worked at Chipotle, was working as a campaigns coordinator for a local public service commission race. And that was when I first became aware of investor-owned utilities as a concept. I had taken a class and had a professor who just sort of offhand mentioned, everyone’s out here talking about these transformative climate policies, but no one’s showing up to PUC meetings and that’s the problem with today’s youth. And so it was like, oh, I’ll go work on one of those campaigns. And that was why I ended up reaching out to that candidate and worked on that race and then had done a lot of volunteer organizing with the Sunrise movement and a lot of other young people in Montana in our utility accountability coalition.

It was such an interesting time in Montana politics that was so polarized. A lot of groups started shifting to utilities because it was a point that was slightly less politicized than some other climate work was. And I was so excited to come work on public power because the more that I tried to work within the current system, the more I became convinced that it was not working. And I was meeting with our youth group, met with the CEO of our utility company in Montana, and we’re talking to them about their decarbonization plan or lack thereof – net zero, but keep investing in coal until 2042. And one of my friends asked the question, how can we trust you when you are saying one thing and doing another? And the CEO just said, well, we’re not asking you to trust us. And I was like, oh, oh really? Wow. And the more I thought about it, I was like, oh yeah, they’re not asking us to trust them. It’s not their job. And so I was so excited to work on this campaign for a utility that their job would be to serve the customers rather than the shareholders. That’s the fundamental flaw with investor-owned utilities is we talk about CMP or Versant, our utilities in Maine doing a bad job. The problem is that they don’t have the right job. Their job is not to provide clean, affordable, or reliable power, and that’s a huge issue.

And CMP in particular, Versant not far behind, have the worst customer satisfaction ratings of utilities in the nation. And that’s largely because several years ago, CMP just mis-billed a hundred thousand people, and I just always find it helpful for things within national audience that might not sound like a lot of people if you live in a big populated place, but that is again, one in 10 Maine customers that is getting an outrageous bill from their utility company. And a lot of people really feel like that that was not resolved well. And there’s just a huge, all of those things to me when I was, I had thousands of conversations with voters. People do not trust these companies to be working for them.

And that was because we already pay CMP and Versant. The crazy thing about utilities is that you’re paying based on what they own, that the value of the assets, it’s a rate based way of doing things. And so essentially we pay CMP and Versant over a billion dollars a year to rent the grid from these foreign corporations. What this shift would’ve done is moved it to a low cost mortgage, so it would’ve been financed with revenue bonds, not taxpayer money, not state debt revenue bonds of the company that allows Mainers to save right from the beginning and then 9 billion over 30 years while bringing back this local control and also having all future financing be far cheaper than what you get with an investor owned utility where you have to pay shareholders 8 to 12% back on all their investments. That’s all far cheaper with a revenue bond.

So as we’re talking about the climate crisis and a huge investment that’s needed to make our grid work, all of that would’ve been cheaper with Pine Tree Power and all of this would’ve had a say for customers. It would’ve changed it so the customers were the owners rather than the shareholders. So it actually would have, the job would be to work for customers, and there was a great list of company purposes in the legislation that talked about how this company would be needing to work toward electrification and lower prices and better reliability. That’s fundamental shift from the status quo, which is CMP and Versant’s only job. The only job they’ll ever have is to make money for their shareholders.

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It seems so logical as to sometimes people are like, but how does that happen? You cut out the shareholder profits and that means that you can have fewer people getting disconnected. You can be really planning as a company to change the way rates work. We would’ve been able to elect a board that could consider things like there was a really great vision that came out from the Pine Tree Power campaign. It was signed on by all our lead petitioners that were the folks who got it on the ballot in Maine, that one of the things that the Pine Tree Power Company could have done was implement payment as a percentage of income plan, which is a way to make utility rates far more just, and so rather than paying a fixed kilowatt hour rate, it’s done as a percentage of your income. And so lower income folks are not being overwhelmingly hit with these utility bills that they can’t afford.

And the other thing that was really unique was that generally campaigns are between two candidates or two ideas, really unique. To have a campaign that was just so purely between a giant corporation and their own customers, all of this money was coming from our utilities. It was not money that they raised. They essentially had an expense account. And so what that meant is that if you live in Maine, you are getting absolutely inundated by things in your mailbox, mailers, ads on the television, ads on social media, and if you were working on the campaign, it just meant no matter what you did, then there’s just this knowledge every day that there’s 10 of me they just had, rather than a Lucy, they had an entire DC consulting firm doing all the work that we were doing. And so that really had to shift the strategies that we could use.

And ours was an incredibly grassroots campaign because we had a very small staff and I was depending on volunteers for running canvases. We were depending on volunteers to also be donors. We had over 2,000 donors and they had just the utilities, which I think was always really intriguing as well was that I just don’t really know what their campaign did all day. They didn’t raise money, they didn’t talk to voters, they didn’t have volunteers. They really just had a lot of consulting firms spending a lot of money on basically advertising in every avenue imaginable. And then the less tracked spending, because we can’t track it, was at the same time the actual company, not the campaign front groups, were running quote ‘nonpolitical ads’ about just how great of a company CMP and Versant are. And that is something that they haven’t really done before. And so I would call it campaign spending, but it didn’t say Vote No on question three, and so isn’t tracked in the same way, was not officially campaign spending, didn’t run through their ballot action committee. And so truly just getting inundated on all sides.

And I think it will come down to a mix of immediate relief for people with these very real problems with their utilities. I was talking to people who were disconnected that they need their power turned back on. That’s a very concrete, immediate thing. Was talking to even high schoolers who can’t vote yet, who were volunteering on this initiative, who need a utility to be working on climate action. That is an immediate thing that we need as well, combined with this recognition that we also need to more fundamentally shift how we think our utilities and shift toward a model that is really prioritizing customers. And I think holding those reforms and systemic solutions as we move forward are going to be important. But the biggest thing that I see us as having one is that we have a lot more people in Maine who are educated about utilities than perhaps anywhere in the country.

We were talking to thousands of people over the course of this campaign in a way that is pretty unique to statewide ballot initiative campaigns. You’re just able to, even though we weren’t able to talk to the number of people we needed to, we still had thousands of conversations, had ads on digital, not television, had some mailers. That is more than most people hear about utilities anywhere else in the country, like ever. And so that is a huge group of people that is really motivated to be demanding better service on a whole variety of fronts from our utilities. And that education work is something that no matter how much money the utilities spend, they can’t ever take away. And that’s because these are all people with real stories of how their utilities are not serving them. And I think that that’s a big win no matter what.

As for what concrete thing will come out of it, I just don’t think we’re far enough along to know yet. But it’s certainly something I’m motivated to keep doing. I have been really intrigued just over the course of this campaign. I came here fully because of the climate aspects of this bill. I need a utility that works for my climate future, and that’s not investor-owned utilities. It’s not their job, it’s not their job anywhere in the country. It’s really not their job in Maine. But over the course of the campaign, I had so many conversations with people dealing with very immediate health impacts and disconnections. That’s something I’m really motivated to work on in the future too. And so even I running this campaign have learned so much over the course of this campaign. And I think that that learning and also the connections, our campaign really connected, not along partisan lines at all, really had a huge base of support that we were drawing from that really was just people who were most affected by utility issues, which is everyone from young progressive people in Portland who want more climate action to Trump supporting people who’ve been disconnected, who hate their utility for a whole different set of reasons.

And we were able to work together and those relationships are really cool and will last moving forward as well.

Totally different with utility issues. We actually didn’t use the partisan score for our targeting at all because it was not the most effective. And it was really hard to know who to talk to throughout the campaign, which was difficult, but also cool because it meant that we were reaching a whole new group and base and coalition that didn’t exist yet. It wasn’t something that people had data on. So we were essentially creating that data in real time. And our strategy really had to be around how do we identify who our supporters are so that we can then talk to them.

It just doesn’t work. It is not meant to serve customers. And in Maine, that wasn’t two weeks ago, but I don’t think it’ll be anytime in the really near future, but it’s coming. It just is going to take time to build from the 30% of the vote we got to the 51%, but we are doing the right thing. And there’s a lot of people out there who are going to try and make you forget that because they’re getting paid to make you forget that. And then the second thing would just be to really think creatively because no one knows how to do this. This is such a new fight that we’re in against these huge utility corporations that a lot of people haven’t done it before. And it’s not like running a traditional campaign and you’re not using the same targeting. And we were doing a lot of things for the first time and figuring it out.

And we had a very young campaign, for reference, I’m 26. We were just trying to figure it out as we went along. And so it’s helpful to both be willing to do things differently. And I think often when we were doing things differently was some of our most effective moments, like the fact that we were deep canvassing rather than just knocking on doors, telling people to vote for Pine Tree Power, that wouldn’t have worked. We had to have these long conversations persuading people, but also knowing when you can reach out and learn from others. And I think the most important thing for me was finding really great advisors along the way who could provide support emotionally, strategically, monetarily, find the people who are going to help you out. For anyone listening to this, I’m always happy to chat. And I think the last thing is just from Maine’s experience very specifically, I think as a movement, we need to figure out how to fund this work, and that is something that is going to be on all of us to do and was just always going to be the struggle with a statewide initiative just because the floor for how much money you need is so high, and we just didn’t have enough.

I have no doubt that if we were able to talk to every voter in Maine, we would’ve won. It’s just there was never a world that we were going to be able to talk to every voter in Maine because we just didn’t have the money. And so figuring that out first, as lovely as it is to get so caught up in the, I’m doing the right thing, we’re building a movement. This is so exciting. At some point you do just need to nail down how are you going to fund it, and it’s less exciting, but a crucial step nonetheless.