Massachusetts Might Switch to Local Service
By The Boston Globe
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Lexington, a town renowned for its school system and its abundance of historic landmarks and relics from the Colonial era, is now looking to make a name for itself in the electricity business. Some residents, like many in Arlington, say they are fed up with the performance of their current service provider, NSTAR.
The residents say frequent outages affect not only their lights and appliances but also their computers, resulting in lost data files. This problem can be costly for people who work from home and rely heavily on computers.
"It's a disaster when that happens," said Paul Chernick, a consultant who works from his Lexington home. "You're sitting there, typing away, and you lose power. You're panic stricken, and you don't know when [the appliances] will come back on," said Chernick, who heads a group appointed by selectmen last year called the Electric Utility Ad Hoc Committee.
"This has happened too many times, and there are enough people who want to at least explore the idea of providing electricity for ourselves and not rely on this big corporate utility," he said. " There are other towns doing it, and they're having no problems."
Chernick's committee, which is looking into the possibility of starting local electric service, is holding a public meeting Monday at the Clarke Middle School.
An NSTAR spokesman said officials are aware of the movement in Lexington. Michael Monahan said the utility hopes to answer residents' complaints and reassure them about improvements that are on the way. Monahan acknowledged that the system was rife with problems two summers ago but said it is much better now.
"Lexington was one of our hot spots, as well as a few other towns," said Monahan, "but we've worked like crazy to focus our attention on upgrading service."
"In the summer of 2001, we had over 600,000 outages in the whole area, but in [the summer of] 2002, we had 168,000. We're getting better," Monahan said. "They have every right to pursue a municipally run system, but we think we can do a better job."
Concord and Belmont are two towns neighboring Lexington that have their own, municipally operated plants. Under this system, communities hire their own managers and staff to run the day-to-day operations. Rates are set by the board of directors, who are local residents. All hardware and infrastructure, including street lights, transformers, and wiring are maintained by the plant's service crews.
Low rates can be the chief advantage of these systems. They also have fewer layers of bureaucracy and usually offer more responsive service. Across Massachusetts there are 20 municipal plants, including ones in Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Reading, and Wakefield. Chester, a small community in the foothills of the Berkshires, was the last town to found its own system, in 1926. Arlington is another town currently exploring the possibility of a town-owned system. A citizen committee is researching the idea with tentative plans to submit a report to the spring Town meeting.
Lexington selectmen appointed the ad hoc committee in February.
A report produced by the committee cited several reasons for residents' unhappiness with NSTAR, including the number of power outages and the utility's habit of staking a second pole to an existing damaged one, creating what some see as an eyesore.
"We realize they're up as a temporary measure and that NSTAR plans to come back and take them down," said Ingrid Klimoff, an 18-year Lexington resident, "but when is that going to be, in 10 years?"
In addition, NSTAR critics have said they believe Lexington residents can save on electricity bills by purchasing NSTAR's distribution system and buying bulk electricity from a different supplier.
"The cost to buy out their system is unknown to us, and it could be expensive, but once we accomplish that we think we can have cheaper service because a municipally run system doesn't have to pay taxes, and it doesn't have stockholders to please," said Chenick.
Monahan said NSTAR continues to dispatch tree-cutting crews and replace old, damaged equipment. He said double poles will be removed eventually, but he could not provide a specific date when that would start.
