The most fun you’ll have in Pierre this week is Thursday’s meeting of the “Electric Services in an Annexed Area” Interim Committee. The Legislature empaneled this summer study last winter to delay making the hard decisions necessary to avoid civil war between rural electric cooperatives and the municipal electric companies. The rural coops are tired of their city cousins annexing their most populous and profitable regions and leaving the coops with the sparser, harder-to-serve areas; the munis, naturally, are not.
The opening session at 10:00 a.m. Central in Capitol Room 414 will bring light, not heat: first, the Legislative Research Council’s Alex Timperley will recite statutory history and laws in surrounding states; then, Public Utilities Commissioner Chris Nelson will explain the PUC’s role in this prickly process.
The heat will come in the afternoon, when the electric coops, the munis, and investor-owned electric utilities each get an hour to grate their cheese. After the big boys get done talking, the public gets to testify for half an hour before the interim committee cautiously discusses the issue and the next steps they’ll take before royally torquing off at least one powerful lobby.
If you’d like to educate committee members before they take their seats Thursday (or just send them your sympathies), you can e-mail them via their LRC pages:
Anything to report?
Well, Leslie, they’ll meet again August 28. The interim committee has posted the munis’ and the co-ops’ presentations from last week. Just staking territory, no solutions yer.