This has never been done before, the politics analyst said on the radio, so we don’t know what to expect. He was talking about a bill for a referendum on creating a publicly-owned electricity utility called Pine Tree Power.

It has been done before. Quite a few places have publicly-owned utilities. And the Legislature’s Committee on Energy, Utilities and Technology voted 9-2 on June 1 to recommend that the bill sending Pine Tree Power to referendum pass the full Legislature.

For now, public-power ownership breaks down into two issues. First, should Maine people vote on creating Pine Tree Power to replace Central Maine Power and Versant, Maine’s two electricity distributors? Second, is publicly-owned power a good idea?

First thing first.

Asked directly, and twice, on public radio, Gov. Janet Mills wouldn’t say whether she favored voters weighing in. Instead, she rattled off doubts about whether Pine Tree Power could work. When I was a reporter, we called that kind of answer a filibuster.

Odd alliances may be forming here. In general, Maine Democrats favor referendums, Republicans oppose. But the guv won’t say, and her answers to questions she hadn’t been asked were about the second thing, the value of publicly-owned power. Does this put her in line with former Gov. Paul LePage, who opposes referendums? On the other side, Sen. Rick Bennett, R-Oxford, backs the bill, written by Rep. Seth Berry, D-Bowdoinham. Mills also favors CMP’s corridor to carry power from Quebec to Massachusetts, with a bit of it stopping off here in Maine. LePage favored the corridor from the get-go.

Second thing. Do private utilities offer better service than publicly owned utilities (Part A)? Do private utilities offer lower rates than publicly-owned utilities (Part B)?

I have lived in places with publicly-owned utilities (Columbia, Missouri; Nashville; Montreal) and privately owned (New Sharon; Kansas City; Allentown, Pennsylvania). Some gave good service, some terrible.

Here are examples.

In 1947, an ice storm hit Columbia, cutting off power for three weeks. We heated our house with oil, but with no electricity we couldn’t start the furnace. So we lived in the kitchen, where the gas range worked, and in the dining room, which held in our body heat if we closed all three doors. We didn’t know then the danger of using the range for heat.

My sharpest memory is that the city-owned utility was overwhelmed by downed wires, which lay for days in the street, untouched, and my father jumping over them as he walked to work each day. Second memory: None of my four sisters and I killed one another despite having to hunch up under the dining table at night for warmth. A miracle.

For at least two years, CMP has ranked dead last — that’s out of more than 3,300 companies — in reputation for service. Below even Pacific Gas & Electric, which has caused 1,500 wildfires, including one that killed 85 people at Paradise, California.

Montreal is served by the provincially-owned Hydro-Quebec. In our 54 months there, power went out once. For a few minutes. Hydro-Quebec was so stunned by the outage that it took out full-page apology ads in the city’s newspapers. (Bear in mind that Hydro-Quebec service 50 years ago has nothing to do with its pushing the CMP corridor today.)

Here in New Sharon, I’ve had about a dozen outages in the past two years, including two that lasted more than 24 hours. I can’t recall the power going out in six years in Kansas City, 18 months in Allentown (not even in the blizzard of ’79) or two years in Nashville.

Here we get to part B of the second thing, the rates. John Costin wrote the utility committee that he moved his woodworking business to Sanford, which has CMP power, from Kennebunk, which gets power from Kennebunk Light and Power, a consumer-owned utility. “We did not change anything about our business operations,” Costin wrote, “but my total cost per kilowatt-hour went from $0.13674 with [KL&P] to $0.32714. This cost increase does not reflect better service.”

Costin’s and my experiences suggest that publicly-owned utilities charge less for electricity. Though not always a lot less.

My CMP bill for May was $43.49, or 17.897 cents per kilowatt hour. Of that, $15.67 was for the electricity and $27.82 was for CMP to deliver it to my house.

If I still lived in Montreal, the cost would have been $17.74 total (7.3 cents per kwh). In Nashville, it would have been $24.32 (10.001 cents/kwh). On the privately-owned side, if I still lived Kansas City, my bill would have been about $26.56 (10.9 cents/kwh). In the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania, about $30.86 (12.7 cents/kwh). All less than CMP.

If Maine people do get to decide who owns the electricity distribution utilities, CMP and Versant and perhaps Gov. Mills will have to explain these differences.

Researching this column, Bob Neal found lots of oddities. One is that the privately-operated Versant is owned by ENMAX, which is owned by the city of Calgary, Alberta. Neal can be reached at turkeyfarm@myfairpoint.net.

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