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KEEPING POWER UTILITIES IN CORPORATE HANDS DOESN’T MAKE SENSE  
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Liza Featherstone
December 29, 2025
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ A new study shows that socialist plans to take over the privately
owned power utility in New York’s Hudson Valley would lower rates
for users and improve its long-term health. Public ownership of power
companies is better for everyone but the rich. _

Average New Yorkers are hurting as utility bills keep going up.
Public takeovers of power companies offer one way to bring those bills
down., John Paraskevas / Newsday RM via Getty Images

 

All over the country, Americans are struggling to pay their utility
bills. In the Hudson Valley, the situation is particularly dire, with
some ratepayers coping with surprise monthly bills of thousands of
dollars. It doesn’t have to be that way, according to the region’s
democratic socialists, who are leading a fight to lower prices.

 

 
A bill introduced by Sarahana Shrestha, a democratic socialist
assemblywoman in Assembly District 103 in the Mid-Hudson Valley, and
her state senate colleague, Michelle Hinchey, calls for a state
takeover of the utility company serving the area. A feasibility study
[[link removed]] by NewGen
Strategies and Solutions, commissioned by Shrestha’s office, says a
public takeover would provide millions in savings to New York State
and its ratepayers.

According to the study’s projections, a publicly owned utility —
unlike a private company — would no longer have to pay state and
local taxes or make profit for its shareholders, allowing it to save
$15.2 million in its first year alone. After that, the savings keep
growing: $34.4 million by year five, $56.2 million by year ten, $116.8
million by year twenty, and $210.5 million by year thirty. These
savings would allow the utility to lower costs to ratepayers. It would
also allow for more stability, making billing more predictable for
consumers and fund much-needed repairs to infrastructure.

Energy affordability is a matter of serious urgency in the area. In
2024, Central Hudson had to settle a $60 million class action lawsuit
over a billing fiasco. One of Shrestha’s constituents, who lives in
a recreational vehicle, didn’t get a bill for more than a year. When
they did, it was for $6,000.

Shrestha, who was a climate organizer and active in Mid-Hudson Valley
Democratic Socialists of America before her election in 2022, ran for
office on energy affordability, finding that, when she talked with
neighbors, it was one of their top concerns. Some ratepayers were
finding thousands of dollars incorrectly overdrawn from their bank
accounts. Shrestha has held some eighteen town halls on the idea of a
takeover of the utility.

“There are certain things that are just not designed for the private
sector,” Shrestha says, and energy delivery “is, for me, at the
top of that list.” (She notes that health care is another example.)
While the model has always depended on fleecing the ratepayer, she
points out some recent developments that make it especially untenable.

 

 
One is aging infrastructure, which a for-profit company doesn’t have
the incentive to fix, like “leak-prone pipes, things that are very
expensive to fix when you are using that capital investment to also
increase your profits,” Shrestha describes. That model, she says,
“is spiraling the rates out of control at a time when we do have
real supply chain issues.” In addition to the aging infrastructure,
she continues, utilities also need to build resiliency against new
threats bombarding contemporary life like cyberterrorism and extreme
weather. They also need to create grids that can deliver renewable
energy, reduce emissions, and avoid worsening the climate crisis. All
of that, Sreshtha says, can be done better outside a for-profit model.

The utilities depend on consumers’ revenues for the whole system to
function, but this model is extremely expensive, unpredictable, and
burdensome for the very consumers on which it depends. “That’s an
insane catch-22 for somebody who’s just trying to have the lights or
fridge on,” Shrestha exclaims. “We don’t need investors to be
owners here. We can own this ourselves.”

In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a speech on precisely this issue,
in Portland, Oregon, declaring,

I therefore lay down the following principle: That where a community
— a city or county or a district is not satisfied with the service
rendered or the rates charged by the private utility, it has the
undeniable basic right, as one of its functions of Government, one of
its functions of home rule, to set up, after a fair referendum to its
voters has been had, its own governmentally owned and operated
service.

Shreshtha, working within the tradition of community-driven energy
democracy that FDR championed, has been less focused on the Albany
side of the legislative process than on building local support. “I
don’t think anybody in the campaign really believes the top-down
approach makes sense or is even feasible,” she says, explaining that
the campaign has focused on local elected officials like town
supervisors as well as city councils and county legislatures — and,
most of all, the public. Mid-Hudson Valley DSA and its partners in the
Hudson Valley Public Power Coalition have been tabling, phone banking,
and holding town halls. The next town hall is in Poughkeepsie, which
just elected a democratic socialist town councilor, on January 22.

New York state representative Sarahana Shrestha speaks at a rally for
public power. (Office of Sarahana Shrestha)

One finding from the feasibility study affirms Sreshtha’s (and
FDR’s) emphasis on public support. Shreshta points to “delightful
lessons” from Massena, a tiny conservative North Country town of
about ten thousand, whose public utility takeover Shrestha calls
“one of the great success stories of recent times.” For years,
Massena fought a privately owned utility company that, in her telling,
“kept screwing them over.” The town repeatedly voted to spend the
money to acquire the utility. They quickly made that money back. In
its feasibility study, NewGen says, “the one fundamental lesson”
from Massena is that “a high level of enduring public commitment to
the formation of a municipal utility is probably the single most
indispensable ingredient in that process.”

 

 
Legislative momentum is building. In a recent _New York Times_ article
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Democrats in Albany sounded ready to introduce her bill, which the
assemblywoman notes with some surprise. She remarks, too, that Antonio
Delgado, New York’s current lieutenant governor, who is launching a
primary challenge to Governor Kathy Hochul, also recently tweeted his
support of the idea.

All that is encouraging, but Shrestha says there is much work to do on
the local level. The utility will put out extensive misinformation and
will fight hard. Before the legislative fight begins in earnest, she
says, “we want our information to be familiar to people before they
start getting the utility’s information.”

The stakes are high for the ratepayers of the Hudson Valley, but
they’re also bigger than that: Shrestha is hoping that if a public
takeover works in Central Hudson, it will lend support to the fight
for public energy elsewhere. Rochester, New York, has been fighting
for energy municipalization for a long time, while in Tucson, Arizona,
the idea is just taking root. There’s also an effort brewing on Long
Island, where there is little left-wing political leadership. But as
the Massena experience shows, experiments of this kind can succeed in
politically unexpected places.

Shrestha and I discuss the issue in the context of the cost-of-living
crisis that’s hitting many Americans so hard. “The rate increases
being requested at a time of affordability crisis are scary,” says
Shrestha. And other than a public takeover, “there seems to be no
solution. We can’t say, ‘Do not replace the leak because it’s
too expensive.’ We can’t say, ‘Don’t hook up renewables
because it’s too expensive.’ So nobody has a solution, I believe,
outside of our proposal.”

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Liza Featherstone is a columnist for _Jacobin_, a freelance
journalist, and the author of _Selling Women Short: The Landmark
Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart_.

* New York; Renewable Energy; Energy Production; Public Ownership
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