Power to the People is a column by Donald M. Kreis, New Hampshire’s Consumer Advocate. Kreis and his staff of four represent the interests of residential utility customers before the NH Public Utilities Commission and elsewhere.

DONALD M. KRESIS, Power to the People

Bastille Day is nigh, and ratepayers in Maine are storming the gates of the fortress with torches and pitchforks.

Since I am the ratepayer advocate in New Hampshire, I would not presume to interfere in, or even opine on, utility regulation in the Pine Tree State.  But, dang!  What’s going on across the Piscataqua River Bridge sure is interesting.

On the desk of Governor Janet Mills, for her signature or veto, is LD 1706, “An Act to Create the Pine Tree Power Company.”  But what we’re really talking about is imposing the death penalty on Maine’s two investor-owned electric utilities, Central Maine Power (CMP) and Versant Power.

Here in New Hampshire, CMP is known chiefly as the former employer of native Mainer Joe Purington, president of Eversource subsidiary Public Service Company of New Hampshire.  But within Maine itself, CMP is known as Central Maine Fiasco, thanks in large part to its disastrous roll-out of a new billing system in 2017.

According to an investigation by the Portland Press Herald, more than 100,000 CMP customers received inaccurate and, in some instances, outrageously expensive power bills. Other customers stopped receiving bills altogether; they just got shutoff notices.

All of this, by the way, happened after Purington quit CMP and took a job with Eversource in New Hampshire.  Savvy utility executives know when to get out while the going is still good, and PSNH’s billing system works just fine.

CMP’s reputation among Mainers has not necessarily been furthered by the fact that it is the developer of the transmission line known as New England Clean Energy Connect (NECEC), cutting across a swath of the Kennebec wilderness to move what some consider renewable power from Hydro-Quebec to Massachusetts.  You may recall that NECEC was Plan B for Massachusetts, after our Site Evaluation Committee rejected the Northern Pass project that Eversource wanted to develop for the same reason.

Overall, as the proponents of LD 1706 are fond of pointing out, last year both CMP and Versant were ranked dead last in their respective categories (large and midsize utilities in the eastern U.S.) for customer satisfaction by the consumer research firm J.D. Power.  Oh, and did we mention that both CMP and Versant have foreign owners, CMP’s in Spain and Versant’s in the Canadian province of Alberta?  That probably doesn’t help.

If signed by Governor Mills, if allowed to become law via pocket veto, or if enacted by the Maine Legislature via veto override, LD 1706 would put an interesting question before the voters of the Pine Tree State.  Should these two electric utilities be seized by the government and placed in the hands of a board whose majority is publicly elected?  (The rest of the board would be appointed by the elected members.)

There is, of course, a catch.  It is, specifically, a pesky little thing called the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Ask a random person on the street about the Fifth Amendment and they will almost surely mention the right to avoid self-incrimination in criminal proceedings.  Ask a random utility executive the same question and they are likely to mention the very end of the Fifth Amendment, which says that private property cannot be “taken for public use, without just compensation.”

Everything I know about constitutional law (or, at least, almost everything) I learned in Portland, as a student at the University of Maine School of Law.  I lived in Portland for 14 years and Maine is where I first rubbed up against the world of utility regulation, by writing about CMP, and trash-burning electricity generators, as a news reporter back in the 80s.  Nowadays, my daughter is a student at an obscure college in Brunswick, Maine.

So what goes down, down east, is of more than passing interest to me.  Especially when it comes to what to do about Maine’s troubled electric utilities.

Will Maine’s governor, and, ultimately, will Maine’s voters, be willing to pony up the cash to pay off the utility shareholders?  One thing we know from experience, here in New Hampshire, is that utility management truly does treat such initiatives as a death threat.

And, in a sense, well they should. We’re talking about killing off a pre-existing, profit-maximizing corporate entity and substituting an entirely different kind of corporate “person” — public ownership.  The successful effort by the City of Nashua to gain control of the Pennichuck Corporation lasted nearly a decade and, trust me, is the single most contentious proceeding to come before the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission so far this century.

That one ended in an odd draw.  The Pennichuck Corporation actually won a reprieve; it and its family of water utilities still exist, the parent technically remaining an investor-owned company, but with just one shareholder: the City of Nashua.  Having cast-off profit-maximizing owners, Pennichuck insists that its rates now are lower than they would have been under the ancien regime, a claim no one has been able to disprove.

In Maine, the scenario would play out differently.  LD 1706 assigns their PUC no role in determining the purchase price of either utility.  When the current owners dispute the price set by a court-approved referee, as they inevitably will, the dispute lands at the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.

One somewhat inscutable aspect of LD 1706 is the lengths to which the sponsors have gone to avoid legally constituting the would-be Pine Tree Power as an electric cooperative.  As we know over here, thanks to the New Hampshire Electric Cooperative, co-ops have a (mostly) noble history as consumer-owned but completely private utilities since their advent during the Great Depression as a New Deal initiative.

A plan to cooperatize Maine’s electric industry would have headed off at the pass the published criticism of three distinguished former members of the Maine PUC (Tom Welch, Sharon Reishus, and David Littell, the latter an attorney who now represents Versant) of creating a utility that is “a government entity managed by politicians.”  Co-ops are private sector democracy – the best of both words.

Ultimately, I have no advice for Governor Mills or for Maine voters with respect to LD 1706.  My counterpart in Maine, the venerable (and, alas, soon-to-be-retired) Public Advocate Barry Hobbins, is neutral on LD 1706.  I defer to Barry on Maine matters.

But I do have some advice for my constituency, New Hampshire’s residential utility customers.  Keep an eye on how this plays out in Maine.  “As Maine goes, so goes the nation” hasn’t been a surefire maxim since 1936 (when Alf Landon carried Maine but FDR was reelected).  But any time there is a ratepayer insurgency, especially one close to home, there are valuable lessons to be learned – for utility ratepayers and utility owners alike.