How an Upstate Town Took Back Its Power

It took another seven years of legal battles and two more referendums before Massena flipped the switch to a new, city-owned utility. When it finally happened, in May 1981, utility bills dropped by a quarter. The town hasn’t looked back since.

Opponents feared Massena would set off a domino effect, and towns throughout New York would wrest control of their grids from the likes of Con Edison and National Grid. But they didn’t — and today, even as progressive climate advocates lead a new fight for public power, Massena’s story remains little known.

“That’s what makes Massena so unique — that we saw it through,” said Andrew McMahon, superintendent of the city-owned Massena Electric Department. Others have tried only to see the effort fall apart, he said. In Massena, “the town hung together.”

Many of the debates that animated Massena’s fight over public power are now playing out again in cities like Rochester and statewide: a well-funded pushback from the incumbent utility; an acrimonious split between unions; and the fear that a government takeover could leave taxpayers footing the bill with little to show in return.

More than forty years on, Massena — population now around 12,000 — still has some of the cheapest, cleanest electricity in the state. Its electricians are unionized and maintain reliable service in a region bordering Canada and often hit by harsh winter weather. To locals on both sides of the aisle, municipal ownership of the grid has come to seem like common sense.

By 1980, the town had spent almost all of the $4.5 million voters had approved on legal fees — and had “zilch” to show for it, Nicandri recalled. Niagara Mohawk kept up its wide-ranging public relations campaign against the takeover; Massena couldn’t advertise. Autoworkers in the heavily union town sided with public power, but the utility’s unionized workers stood by their employer.

Still, support for municipalization only seemed to grow. A second referendum in 1977 saw the margin grow to three-to-one in favor. The town was locked in a much tighter battle in the courts, Nicandri said. But in December 1980, he got a call from Niagara Mohawk’s lawyer, inviting him for lunch in a private Syracuse club. The company was prepared to settle the case if Massena revised its plans, taking over a broader swath of territory including expensive-to-serve rural areas. That would mean going back to voters to ask for more money, but Niagara Mohawk would stay neutral.

A third and final referendum in March 1981, asking voters to more than double the bond issue to $10 million, yielded a five-to-one margin in favor. Less than two months later, Niagara Mohawk handed over the reins, and the Massena Electric Department was born. Rates immediately dropped 24 percent for residential customers and even more for businesses.

Massena Electric’s standard rate for residential customers is around four cents per kilowatt hour, all charges included. That makes it some of the cheapest electricity in the country — largely thanks to NYPA’s preferential rates for municipal utilities. National Grid customers pay closer to 15 cents per kilowatt hour, on average.

Nicandri is quick to warn that recreating Massena’s model today would be difficult at best, particularly at a larger scale. The NYPA hydropower that allows for its rock bottom rates is already all allocated, and changing that would require a political decision from high up. And that’s without even taking into account the kind of resistance incumbent utilities might put up.

“It’s very easy to say, ‘Hell, we ought to set up our own electric system,’” he said. “Well, it’s not a snap.”

A new generation of New York socialists is eager to take that challenge on. After years of campaigning, they succeeded this spring in passing a version of their flagship bill, the Build Public Renewables Act, which gives NYPA a renewed mandate to build clean power. But for many in the Public Power NY campaign, that’s just a first step: Ultimately, they want to see the state do away with investor-owned utilities altogether and replace them with publicly run ones. (Nebraska already operates this way, and voters in Maine are weighing whether to take the leap this fall.)

That branch of the campaign has been put on hold in New York, though, as the coalition has focused its attention on passing and implementing the BPRA. Public power organizers say they plan to hash out next steps over the summer. Meanwhile, a group in Rochester is pushing for a test run in the state’s third-largest city — but local leaders have yet to sign off on the study needed to start the process. Downstate, a commission is weighing the prospect of restoring the Long Island Power Authority to full public control by cutting out its current third-party operator, the New Jersey-based PSEG.

That kind of wrangling is familiar to veterans of Massena’s seven-year fight. But for most locals, public power is just a fact of daily life.

Tim Peets, a general contractor in Massena, said the public system brings a number of advantages. Among them is reliability: If repairs need to be made, “they’re right on it,” he said, and power rarely goes out for more than a flicker even in intense winter storms.

“We rebuilt almost the entire system since 1981,” McMahon said. And it paid off: When a major ice storm hit in 1998, Massena’s power was out for just two days, McMahon said. Niagara Mohawk took three weeks to fully restore service. (National Grid bought out the utility two years later.)

National Grid spokesperson Jared Paventi declined to comment on how the company’s rates compare with Massena’s, noting that electricity prices fluctuate like any other market, but said the company had a strong record of reliability. In the fiscal year ending March 31, “we achieved 99.9% reliability on our electric distribution and transmission networks across the state,” he said.

A similar dynamic has shaped debates over public power today: Unions representing energy workers broadly opposed expanding NYPA’s role in the clean energy transition, citing stiff resistance from the authority in contract negotiations. An IBEW local representing utility workers in Rochester has also come out against the campaign for municipal power there.

But, then as now, labor’s voice was not unanimous. In Massena, the United Auto Workers — representing hundreds of local GM workers — fiercely defended public power. When it prevailed, Massena Electric’s linemen quickly joined the IBEW and signed their first contract in 1983. They still belong to the same local today.

Working for a public utility has advantages besides union wages, Sheridan said. Massena Electric’s linemen are required to live within the service sector — for accountability reasons — and do almost all of their work locally, which means they come home to their families every night, unlike other electricians who regularly crisscross the state for jobs.

Massena Electric also boasts an unusually clean power supply: Roughly two-thirds of the total power it sells come emissions-free from NYPA’s massive Niagara and St. Lawrence dams, McMahon said. That’s thanks to a longstanding allocation of hydropower from the two dams to New York’s 51 municipal and cooperative utilities.

But that allocation doesn’t cover all of Massena’s power. In winter, when residents crank their electric heaters, the utility turns to the state’s fossil-fuel heavy grid mix to close the gap. That gives them a taste of the same volatile prices that other customers face. In some cold months, rates can reach double what they normally pay.

The utility has been looking into ways it could boost its renewable share. So far, it hasn’t panned out, McMahon said. They looked into wind and solar, but local weather conditions aren’t favorable. They looked into new hydro, but they ran into permitting problems. Now, they’re considering buying into a clean power project further afield. Massena could also benefit if NYPA builds its own renewables, as it now promises to do.