Sangamon County Auditor and Springfield mayoral candidate Paul Palazzolo doesn’t buy what he calls City Water Light and Power’s “overnight $8 million crisis.”
He says asking customers for more money is the wrong way to go, especially if the utility wants to attract new customers.
“If we’re going to bring customers to the city, whether they’re data farms or server farms, and we want to encourage them to use Springfield as their base, we need to be able to say ‘our utility has one of the best rates in Illinois,” he says.
CWLP has proposed raising residential and business customer fees, passing along regulatory costs and wants the city to implement a 2.67 percent municipal tax on all residents. It says this is needed to avoid technical default this year. Electric rates would go down four percent next March.
The utility blames a weak market for wholesale power prices and, in part, a cool summer for its most recent financial woes. CWLP hasn’t realized the profit it thought it would by selling power on the open market due to prices that tumbled at the start of the recession and have been slow to recover.
Palazzolo wants to put in what he calls a “professional general manager”, set up advisory boards and consolidate services. He doesn’t think CWLP should get out of the power generation business, however.