Sign the correct petition if you oppose utility’s bailout
means of helping Ohio businesses and workers, HB 6 hurts both by giving businesses an incentive to locate to a nearby state with moreaffordable power.
It’s already cost Ohio jobs and $1.5 billion in investments in the state’s blossoming natural gas industry. Even before legislators finalized HB 6, businesses scrapped plans for natural gas-fired power plants in northeast and northwest Ohio, knowing they would be unable to compete with electricity that ratepayers had been forced to help bankroll.
Unless vetoed by the voters, HB 6 will force consumers to subsidize the Davis-besse and Perry nuclear plants owned by Firstenergy Solutions, an arm of Akron-based Firstenergy that is working to emerge from bankruptcy protection. It also bails out two coal-fired power plants — one in Ohio, the other in Indiana, owned by a group that includes American Electric Power.
And the bill guts Ohio’s renewable energy and energy efficiency programs.
To summarize: Unless voters say “no,” the bill would force utility customers to subsidize uncompetitive power plants, remove all incentives to build more energy efficient power plants and cancel programs that help customers use less electricity. It does provide safe shelter for five solar projects. Unfortunately, they will be able to sell their power safe from the cost discipline of competition. It’s a bill that only a utility — and the political establishment it showers with donations — could love.
Whether voters have a chance to weigh in on the bailout will not be known until the referendum campaign plays out.
The anti-bailout team has until Monday, Oct. 21, to gather 265,000 valid signatures to put the measure before voters. With the help of millions in dark money and old-fashioned thuggery, pro-bailout forces are trying to intimidate people from signing the petitions by employing “blockers” who harass people being asked to sign them. They also are offering thousands of dollars to try to lure away petition circulators hired by those who oppose the bailout.
Bailout supporters are circulating their own lookalike, nonbinding petitions to further confuse voters.
If you want to stand up for consumers and sign a petition, make sure you sign the correct one. Real petitions bear the name of Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts, and they have defined blocks in which signers list their names and addresses. Fake petitions simply have lines, similar to the ones found on legal pads.
Regardless of what the pro-bailout forces say, electricity costs will go up unless the electorate votes this down. Firstenergy and its lobbyists say that I am wrong. Where’s my proof? It’s in the millions of dollars they have invested in lobbying, lawyers, deceptive campaign ads and phony, sometimes violent petition gatherers and blockers.
Firstenergy Solutions’ bankruptcy records document that front groups have spent lavishly on ads that have run on TV and social media platforms. A dark money group, Generation Now, sank nearly $5 million into pro-hb 6 TV and radio ads and a million more on Statehouse legislative races. And records link an employee at a lobbying firm that was paid more than $800,000 by Firstenergy Solutions to the written testimony of at least seven people who testified in favor of the bailout bill.
No entity that invests so heavily in paid media, lobbyists and political contributions is looking to reduce its revenues. Firstenergy expects a sizeable return on its sizeable investment.
It has worked for them in the past. Firstenergy has been seeking and receiving bailouts for years.
Firstenergy has not earned our trust, and it must not benefit from the confusion it has created. The issue deserves to go before voters, and the winner should be determined by a free and open debate — not by which side pays the most to win and which knows how to buy the spin cycle. This is a battle between truth and truthiness. Let’s hope that truth wins out.