Tag: politics

This one is basically just for Ann Arborites:

Proposal E is on your ballot for the upcoming election (get those ballots in by Tuesday Nov 3!).

I’m gonna vote NO on Prop E.

Here is the entirety of the ballot language:

Creation and Governance of a Municipal Electric Utility
Shall Chapter 15 of the Charter be amended to require the City to establish a municipal electric utility and governance structure therefore?

That sounds good–so good, that I thought we’d already voted for this. This left me confused as to why I had to vote for this again, so I looked at the complete ordinance language that would be enacted if Prop E passes. I walked away more confused and started to get worried.

Anyway, here is the skinny:

1. Prop E has nothing to do with the SEU that something like 80% of us supported and is already doing really good work that brings together renewable energy and justice. Bravo!
2. Prop E is a totally separate parallel effort to buy the crappy power infrastructure we have (poles and lines and transformers and all the other things that blow down every time we have a big wind) from DTE
3. That requires a massive immediate investment (on the order of $500,000,000 to $1 billion)
4. That equipment has been neglected for decades (which is why folks are mad enough here to want to start their own power company), so we’d also inherit the maintenance burden on busted down old equipment
5. That price tag does not include any way to generate power; we’d still need to buy that on the open market. We’d just be buying poles and wires.
6. The only avenue to pay for this is basically rate increases, so power would get more expensive immediately (in a city already deep into a housing affordability crisis that is forcing out families and shrinking our schools), at a time when people are acutely aware of rising energy costs (data centers, A.I., wars in Europe and the Middle East, etc.)
7. There is no recent example of a community successfully buying out a local utility company and converting it to a municipal utility. Boulder (a much wealthier community than Ann Arbor—which is by no means economically deprived) tried and failed. The successful municipal utilities here in Michigan were formed in the late 1800–1900s and were the original power companies in those areas; there are only two examples of a community buying out a traditional power company in Michigan, one is Bay City (which was already running its own municipal utility and bought out redundant grid structure) and the other Traverse City—who did so in 1912. Point being: conditions are somewhat different now, and pointing to success in Lansing (Lansing Board of Water & Light, founded 1885) and Holland (Holland Board of Public Works, 1893) are not good priors for us buying ill-maintained second-hand equipment from DTE in 2027 in a city that has no power generation capacity and nowhere to build it.

This roundtable discussion composed almost entirely of environmentalists, activists, and developers with a track record for sustainability and eliminating reliance on fossil fuels helped me understand what I was missing when I looked at this inscrutable wall of text:

Give this a watch and don’t forget to get your ballot in early or show up in-person on Nov 3.