Arthur W. Cleaves is director of the York County Emergency Management Agency and
former director of the Maine Emergency Management Agency.

When the lights go out during a winter storm, my phone starts ringing. As director of York County Emergency Management Agency, I’ve fielded those calls for years. Families worried about elderly relatives without heat. Municipal officials opening emergency shelters. Hospital administrators watching backup generators drain fuel reserves.

I understand why many Mainers are protesting Central Maine Power’s proposed rate increase. When you’re already struggling to pay bills, an additional $35 per month feels unbearable. These concerns are legitimate.

But here’s what I’ve learned from nearly three decades in emergency management: the
question isn’t whether we’ll pay for grid improvements. The question is when, and how
much.

Right now, Maine customers are already paying storm recovery fees on their electric bills. These are expenses that come from reacting to disasters rather than preventing them. We also pay in spoiled food, lost wages and business closures. We pay when vulnerable residents end up in emergency rooms because they couldn’t power medical equipment or heat their homes. And as extreme weather becomes more frequent and severe, these costs are rising.

During major outages affecting communities from Acton to Wells, we scramble to open shelters, manage traffic at dark intersections and respond to medical emergencies in homes without power. Every hour without electricity multiplies the toll.

CMP’s proposal represents a shift from reactive emergency spending to proactive infrastructure investment.

The key improvements include:

Tree management: In the most forested state in the nation, falling trees are our number one cause of outages. Covered wire and enhanced tree programs address the root cause rather than just cleaning up damage afterward.

Smart grid technology: Installing 2,500 smart devices would restore power remotely for up to 400,000 customers. When a tree falls on one section of line, your power comes back in minutes instead of hours or days.

Grid interconnection: Currently, when a single line goes down, tens of thousands can lose power at once because there’s no backup route. Creating redundancy means if one path fails, power flows from another direction while repairs are made. From an emergency management perspective, preventing a crisis is always cheaper than responding to one.

The proposal would increase rates by approximately $35 per month. That’s significant, especially for families already stretched thin. The Maine Public Utilities Commission must carefully weigh this burden, particularly on low-income residents.

But consider the alternative. Deferring this investment won’t make customers better off. Our grid isn’t getting younger, our storms aren’t getting milder and emergency repair costs aren’t going down. Every year we wait, our aging infrastructure becomes more vulnerable and more expensive to fix.

I’ve coordinated responses where hospitals came perilously close to exhausting backup power. I’ve watched families struggle after storms knocked out power to tens of thousands at once. These aren’t abstract scenarios. They’re the predictable results of aging infrastructure facing 21st-century weather with 20th-century equipment.

The Public Utilities Commission must balance affordability concerns with infrastructure needs. But we must also weigh the cost of continued reactive spending, the economic impact of repeated outages, and the very real risks to public safety when our grid fails during extreme weather.

From where I sit, coordinating emergency response during our worst storms, the choice is clear. We can invest in prevention now, or we can keep paying for emergency repairs later. One builds a stronger Maine. The other just kicks the problem down the road. The storms aren’t waiting. Neither should we.