Small-business owners are always worrying about work. Customers, payroll and inventory top the list of our worries. That’s why we appreciate any degree of certainty and consistency. If voters approve Pine Tree Power’s referendum to create a state electric utility, we’ll be faced with even more uncertainty and far less consistency. Essentially, we’ll be subjected to an untried, untested idea fraught with many unknowns.

The biggest unknown is Pine Tree Power’s cost. Estimates are all in the billions of dollars. That’s an enormous amount of money for the state to borrow and a huge debt to foist onto ratepayers – especially when we’re given no assurances that our electricity rates, for either supply or delivery, will be any lower.

It’s unknown, too, how long it will take for the courts to finalize what will be an unprecedented takeover of two existing private utilities. It could be more than a decade. All that time, businesses will have to keep operating without knowing what to expect next. Greater uncertainty will surely follow when our electricity is under the control of Pine Tree Power’s politicized elected board.

Gov. Mills said she was concerned Pine Tree Power had the potential to create “more problems than it solves.” Her judicious choice of words says to me that it’s a bad idea. Small businesses can’t afford more problems. And we certainly can’t afford to take a multibillion-dollar risk on a bad idea.

Marcia Feller
Falmouth

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