Our Work in 2022
May 2022
More than 48,000 residential customers in the Central Hudson service territory face power shutoffs
“As families and local businesses suffer from Central Hudson’s billing fiasco, the utility has chosen to focus on supporting an astroturf campaign by the fossil fuel industry to undermine support for New York’s climate law and a clean, renewable future for our communities,”
“We’re calling on Central Hudson to stop pedaling misinformation about fossil gas as ‘clean’ and ‘affordable,’ and start fixing its broken billing system and providing real solutions to the arrears crisis faced by tens of thousands of customers.”
Central Hudson is under investigation for their billing practices, rate hikes, and the handling of the winter storm that led to power outages in February 2022. Meanwhile, their profit margin has not been affected and Fortis, Inc., which owns Central Hudson, boasts that their shareholder dividends have continued to go up every year! The crisis is statewide: right now, 1.7 million NY households owe over $1.3 billion in bills that are more than 60 days overdue, meaning that the customers’ accounts can be shut off at any time. Businesses owe another $600 million. We were already paying sky-high prices for energy and the recent bill hikes have seen some New Yorkers' bills double or triple in the last few weeks alone. This is a catastrophe and it's not sustainable.
This is a statewide issue, with state-level solutions. We need our state leaders to take action. We are calling on Governor Hochul, the New York State Legislature, and the Public Service Commission to make the for-profit utilities pay for debt relief, not the ratepayers.
When Central Hudson was bought by Canada-based international corporation Fortis, Inc., in 2012, all of Central Hudson’s ownership shares went to Fortis. Today, Fortis runs ten utilities in five countries. It’s a $58 billion corporation that had $9.4 billion in revenue in 2021. According to Fortis’s website, shareholders have enjoyed “48 years of consecutive dividend increases,” and are expecting to ~6% increases through 2025. The top managers aren’t doing badly either. In 2021, CEO David Hutchens’s compensation was $5,447,480. The previous CEO made $10,179,100, including stock holdings. It seems that despite the pandemic, things are going great for shareholders.
Utility shareholders have been making major money throughout the pandemic and it is fundamentally unjust to ask New Yorkers to foot the bill for their profits when so many people have to choose between putting food on the table or keeping the lights on.
The New York legislature has allocated $250 million for utility arrears in response to public pressure, but it isn’t enough to cover all of them. Discussions are ongoing at the state level about how to distribute the funds, who will get help, whether it will only cover arrears that accumulated during the pandemic (March 2020 – March 2022), and whether it should go only to customers who receive HEAP funding – a subset of those in need, since many poor families either do not qualify or haven’t applied. Other proposals include paying off all of the arrears, with the cost to be allocated to other customers over a period of 3-10 years.