A government takeover of our electrical infrastructure is a horrific and terrible idea. Rates will rise, outages will increase and be prolonged because the politicians have no expertise with running a complex utility. When storms roll through, going months without power will become the new norm. In the meantime, our politicians will be debating the root cause of the outages, and dodging blame rather than restoring power by using the current all-hands-on-deck approach.

The politicians who falsely claim they can run our electrical grid better and less expensively than CMP and Versant ignore basic math, along with being responsible for policies that have significantly increased generation costs. At a minimum selling price of $13.5 billion (likely to be much higher), each Maine resident would be given a $9,840 buyout debt. Amortized over 30 years at a 6.5% interest rate, this debt would translate to each Maine resident paying an additional $22,390 in electrical transmission and distribution costs over a 30-year period. This is insane!

Should a government takeover occur, massive tax increases will ensue, along with raids to the education, transportation, and social services budgets to pay this enormous debt? There is no free lunch, and bills must be paid.

Government doesn’t like spending money on infrastructure – have you traveled our roads lately? Avangrid has spent hundreds of millions of dollars upgrading the electrical infrastructure to improve reliability to better serve the customers. Electrical infrastructure upgrades will end with a government owned utility.

I urge our elected officials and the Maine people to reject the hostile government takeover of CMP and Versant. The takeover is too expensive, all risk, no gain, and does nothing to reduce the cost of generation, which is the root cause of the increased price of electricity.

 

Gary Maheux

Waterville

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