Maine Legislature Proposes Yet Another Bill To Force Electric Utilities Into Selling Their Companies To The Government.
Promises are just promises- Wait for the Bill to read what it actually says before forming a point of view.
The Portland Press Herald is reporting that “A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers and advocates is touting a proposal to revoke the monopoly status of the state’s 2 largest power distribution companies and force them to sell their assets to a consumer-owned nonprofit. “
I wonder how one pulls “monopoly status” out of a construct in which there are two large private competitors? The real monopoly is the one coveted here by the State of Maine.
Last year the State was trying to directly create its own monopoly through similar means of forcing private companies to sell, and therein you have the main reason why private companies are better than state-owned companies. The private company cannot write its own laws to its own advantage nor can it force another company to sell its ownership to them.
A consumer-owned, nonprofit corporation would take over for electric companies Central Maine Power and Versant Power under a bill announced Monday by a bipartisan group of Maine legislators and advocates for a locally owned utility. Portland Press Herald
A (as in single) corporation will take over ownership of two private companies (by force) to break up the monopoly that two companies, instead of one, make!
The state government has a monopoly on rights to force others to sell their property, or so the Maine Legislature seems to believe. There is a name for this kind of government. It’s called communism. Much is made about the owners of the companies being foreign, although the Maine government actively seeks investments from global corporations. Under LePage, a bill was enacted that commits Maine Taxpayers to subsidize national or global corporation’s capitalization of jobs - anywhere in the world!
IDEXX Becomes First Corporation to Exploit Maine’s Global Corporate Welfare Act
Yes, the companies are foreignly owned and if Maine can force those companies to sell to the State, then in the global investment world, Maine has yet another point on the Banana Republic score card.
Like the last proposal, the new proposal is said to be “a locally owned utility“ or as local as anything ever gets in a centrally managed economy! That phrase generally means government by boards opaque to the public. The last bill designated a governor-appointed ten-person board with no consumer-owner recourse. That is what was called “local control” the last time the Legislature tried to sell this action.
The text of this bill is not yet released and so the talk is all promises and spins at this point. Representative Seth Berry, D-Bowdoinham, proposed establishing a consumer-owned utility in 2019. There was much debate about it at the time, but after I published a story analyzing what is said in the text of the bill, and in particular opening up a never-before-mentioned link in that bill to read its reference in the Maine statutes, revealing that loan collateral on the bond would be the private property of Maine citizens, the story was shared many times, and thereafter I heard no further mention of the proposed act. Here is the link to that analysis:
Maine Legislature proposes to force buy all electric utilities with debt secured by private property of Maine residents
For that reason, I see no point in getting further involved with any details of this discussion until there is an actual bill made available to read. Therein is the truth.
Imagine if the 2019 bill had been enacted with no public awareness that the collateral for the bond was the private property of Maine citizens. What if thousands of people buying houses in Maine today and had no idea of that simple fact. You have to read the actual bill to know what is really in it.