Decorah City Councilperson At Large Emily Neal hosted a community conversation event Saturday at Impact Coffee in Decorah. Topics related to the city’s proposed municipal electric utility became the main topic of discussion. (Photo by Denise Lana)
By Denise Lana,
Dozens of citizens gathered to sip coffee and chat with Decorah City Councilperson At Large Emily Neal as she hosted a community conversation session Saturday, Jan. 11 at Impact Coffee in Decorah. Every available chair was filled as residents both young and old encircled Neal, asking her about a half dozen questions before discussion turned to the topic of the city’s upcoming municipal electric utility referendum. Voters will decide on March 4 whether the city of Decorah should be authorized to establish its own MEU. A similar question was posed to Decorah residents in 2018, and that referendum failed by three votes.
The main question on most people’s lips Saturday was why a vote was being held again and what specifically the public would be voting on.
Neal explained the ballot will ask simply whether the city may establish a municipal electric utility, but it wouldn’t require the city to build a utility at that point, later saying the city could hypothetically hold its MEU authorization in reserve for a decade while conducting a feasibility study.
“The city would get a piece of paper that says we have a utility,” Neal told Saturday’s attendees. “The city will have no wires, no customers, no infrastructure, no revenue and no debt in order to have this piece of paper.”
She likened the paper to a passport, allowing the city to attend utility meetings with other utility companies and the Iowa Utility Commission.
“Iowa has a regulated monopoly, and utilities are beholden to be transparent to their rate payers,” Neal said. “But utilities claim proprietary information, where they only have to discuss their information with the utility board. But if we were at the table, we would be allowed access to that information.”
Neal went on to say, if Alliant Energy — which currently supplies electricity to most of the city — seeks to raise its rates, the city could potentially have more standing to intervene if a local MEU is established.
“This vote isn’t telling us what an MEU can do, it’s giving us the option to look into what we can do — to sit at the table and look at the rates, the values, the information,” Neal said.
She referred to a previous rate increase, during which Alliant had originally sought to raise rates by 25 percent, but Decorah formed an intervening group and helped lower the increase to 15 percent. More recently, a larger intervening group again helped lower another Alliant rate increase from by similar proportions.
Full article available in the January 16 Decorah Leader.
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