Picking a side in the fight between rural electric cooperatives and municipal electric providers over city government’s ability to annex territory and take equipment and customers away from coops isn’t easy. But apparently all it takes for SDGOP spin blogger Pat Powers (and, by extension, the Republican Party that pays his way?) to finally pick a side is a little cash.
South Dakota Public Power, consisting of municipal utilities, Heartland Consumer Power District, and related entities—has bought an ad on Powers’s Dakota War College to promote the muni side of the issue. Powers not only posts their ad but apes their propaganda in a blog post:
Seeking to preserve local control, lower rates, and consumer choice for electrical consumers, the coalition is advocating for the right of consumers to be served by their locally-owned municipal electric utility.
It’s a pretty timely topic, with the South Dakota Legislators committee on the topic meeting this week for the Committee on Electrical Services in an Annexed Area (10AM on Thursday) [Pat Powers, “Welcome Coalition to Preserve Consumer Choice to Advertiser’s Row!” Dakota War College, 2019.07.22].
Note that Powers doesn’t pause to analyze the name or claims of his sponsor. The municipal electric group advertises under the alias of “Coalition to Preserve Consumer Choice,” which is nice marketing but only half-true: yes, folks outside city limits can ask their nearby city government to annex them (“Annexation is largely voluntary,” SD Public Power says on its lobbying website, “at the request of the developer or landowners because they want to be part of the municipality”), but consumers don’t ever get to directly choose their electric provider… and once a consumer has muni power, that consumer can’t choose to go back to co-op power. Of all the issues at stake in the co-op/muni fight, “consumer choice” is somewhere in the back of the line, behind the primary question of whether municipalities can force rural electric cooperatives to leave new parts of town.
The munis’ other banner claims also stretch their conclusions. No provision of this year’s original Senate Bill 66, the legislation that brought this fight to the surface before getting watered down into the summer study that starts this week, raises taxes. The munis have to argue ancillary effects and political will to get to a tax increase:
If municipal electric utilities lose their ability to annex, property owners will be left without a choice of provider and lose out on any future economic development opportunities. In addition, rates will increase in order to make up for lost revenue. Any new business locating within the city’s growing boundaries would be forced to take power from the rural cooperative, but the city would still be responsible for extending other services. Without electric revenue to supplement these services, all other rates would increase, including property taxes [SD Public Power, anti-rural co-op propaganda webpage, retrieved 2019.07.23].
Wait a minute: are they saying that Madison, Brookings, and other power-vending towns add fees for water, sewer, and other non-electric services on their electric bills? That seems odd: my grocery bill doesn’t include charges for the lumberyard. My Internet bill doesn’t include charges for shoes. Cities must do business differently.
There is an economic argument that freezing electric annexation will hamper efforts to recruit residential developers and big industrial power users who could help spread out electric costs and keep rates down, and that losing out on new residents and users could induce a local government to raise its taxes more than it would have with a broader tax base, but that concatenated argument assumes a lot about economic development and the willingness of city councils to raise taxes and voters not to refer and kill such tax hikes.
The munis’ assertion that legislation like Senate Bill 66 would “create a monopoly” is flatly false. The monopolies already exist. If you live in the country, your rural co-op has a monopoly. If you live in town, your municipal electric co-op or your private utility is a monopoly. You don’t get to shop and buy Sioux Valley Electric this month, Madison power in August, and Xcel Energy through the winter. SB 66 wouldn’t have created any monopoly; it would have stopped changes in which monopoly powers your neighborhood.
The hilarious part of Powers’s siding with the munis is that a few bucks have made him forget that he’s a Republican. SD Public Power is Big Government. Rural electric cooperatives are private entities. SD Public Power’s argument rests unavoidably on the idea that government does things better than the private sector. Consider, for instance, SD Public Power’s argument on transparency:
Cooperatives are not required to hold open meetings, and their boards are made up of members located across a large geographic area. Municipal utilities are required to have open meetings where the public can be heard, and the utility board or city council is made up of local residents with a vested interest in the community [SD Public Power, retrieved 2019.07.23].
Absolutely true: Muni power has to be open, because muni power is government, and the government is us. SD Public Power and Powers are arguing that if you want a vital service like electrical power done right, you have to do it through government. (Even the rural electric cooperatives, which were created thanks to FDR and New Deal REA loans, would have to agree.)
Never mind analysis or political principle; just wind Pat up with money, and whatever words you want will come out of his mouth.
Annexation into a municipality is rarely voluntary. In the 70’s Denver was annexing the land around road intersections out in the middle of nowhere. Not the area, just the few blocks around future retail spots where roads came together. A community activist (Paula Poundstone) got petitions passed and this usurping of future tax gold mines was stopped. Denver’s borders were set in stone. Pound stone, if you will, and the suburbs grew with the self-governance and tax base they needed. *This is why Denver’s population is only 650,000 but the Denver metro area is well over 3 million residents.
*Pat Powers is a fool-tool to his own blog’s greed.
Munis talk about local control as if citizens will ever have a say. Utilities pretty much take what they think they need w/w/o John Q’s permission.
I find it laughable you call DWC a “GOP spin blog” but totally ignore the fact that you are the Democrat Party Spin Blog.
Mr. Curd is amused. Now, isn’t that special?
If the SDGOP is a collection of conservatives they ought to be calling for more electricity providers so there would be Free Market Competition! Yeah! The most high and Holy Market fixes everything!
In reality, what the GOP really loves is $ and power, hence that’s the side they always choose, just as they have in this instance.
Blake, DEMOCRATIC is the correct adjective identifying the Party. But you are spinning the English language I learned in the 60s, to maliciously disparage your liberal neighbors who tell the truth and are invested in the truth. Your Party of con-men and women may hold on to sparsely populated red-neck, racist Trumpism, but it is all crashing down for the GOP and this Republican administration. How many jailed, indicted, charged, unqualified crooks has the GOP “send her back/lock her up” racked up so far? You gonna go to Iran and fight and die? I didn’t think so. The GOP depends on low information, uneducated and brown skins to do their picking cotton and fighting.
[Leslie provides a link to an impact report on annexation in Lakewood, Colorado.]
Blake, there is nothing laughable, incorrect, nor hypocritical about my label for DWC. I openly label myself “liberal media,” and I openly express support for the Democratic Party, but I do not work for or in concert with them when I write blog posts.
If Blake can also get past the drive-by potshot and pay attention to the main issue, he will also notice that Pat’s position on this issue is driven by sponsor money, whereas my analysis (notice that I haven’t really picked a side; I’m just analyzing the munis’ argument here) is not.
DWC is mostly spin; on this issue, DFP offers analysis.
REA, as you mentioned, was a “New Deal” program. Before REA few farmers had electric power simply because it was impossible to make running transmission lines all over the country pay. REA has been targeted for decades. Couple that with the fact that there are no farmers left out here and the Muni’s want to take away their only market that really pay’s and thing’s look bleak.
If you want to move to the country you ought to factor in the cost of making your power.
“Carbon-Free
“The cost of transitioning the U.S. electrical grid to an entirely-carbon-free system is pricey, but not as pricey as originally understood according to a new working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Once you factor in the savings from replacing fossil fuels, the cost of re-doing the grid to be carbon free is about $150 billion annually. But then when you factor in the reality that the U.S. energy generation grid is old as sin and in dire need of upgrade to begin with, that figure actually drops to just an additional $23 billion annually to replace outgoing capacity that already needed to be replaced with upgraded renewables.
Geoffrey Heal, NBER”
From Mike Allen, Axios
$10 trillion?
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/454663-gillibrand-releases-10-trillion-climate-change-plan
Sorry, but a 1 GW wind farm does not deliver 1 GW all the time. You have to pay for something else.
Your source says nothing about costs for waste management or recycling that are implemented as an upfront fee, and ignores replacement and maintenance as well.