MILWAUKEE — As the City of Milwaukee’s Public Transportation, Utilities and Waterways Review Board prepares for its first public hearing on a proposal to establish a city-owned electric utility, Fair Rates for Wisconsin’s Dairyland (FRWD) is urging the Board and the public to put a set of unanswered questions at the center of the conversation.

The proposal would have the city create its own publicly owned electric utility under Wisconsin’s Chapter 197, rather than continue purchasing service from We Energies. FRWD, a coalition that includes organized labor and utilities, says these questions deserve careful study, and that the Board’s examination should be as rigorous and honest as possible before the city moves any further.

“This is one of the most consequential decisions the city could make, and it deserves an honest examination,” said Thad Nation, Executive Director of FRWD. “Our coalition includes publicly owned utilities that serve their communities well every day, so this is not about whether public power can work. It is about whether this specific transition, in this moment, under Wisconsin’s current laws, protects the workers and ratepayers who would have to live with the result. Right now there are far more questions than answers.”

FRWD’s deepest concern is for the skilled men and women who keep the lights on. The lineworkers, gas crews, and control room operators who serve Milwaukee today are private-sector employees with full collective bargaining rights. Under a municipal utility, those same workers could become public employees subject to Act 10, the 2011 law that stripped most public-sector workers in Wisconsin of the right to bargain over their pay, benefits, and working conditions.

“We owe it to these workers to be honest about what could happen to them,” Nation said. “These are good, hard-earned, union jobs in the private sector today. Move them under a city utility and you risk moving them under Act 10, where the bargaining protections they have spent their careers building could simply disappear. That is not a small footnote. For thousands of families, that is the whole question.”

Among the questions FRWD believes the Board should weigh:

•       If utility workers become municipal employees, do they lose their collective bargaining rights under Act 10?

•       Workers are not required to follow their jobs to a city-run utility. If experienced crews choose to stay in the private sector to protect their union and benefits, how does the city replace that hard-won knowledge without putting reliability at risk?

“Reliability is not created by changing who owns the wires. It comes from trained people, proven emergency systems, and the ability to move crews and equipment fast when the weather turns,” Nation said. “When the power goes out on a freezing night, it is not a plan or a structure that restores it. It is a person who knows the job and shows up. The first responsibility of this debate is to those people.”

FRWD is also focused on affordability. Today the cost of storm response, cybersecurity, grid modernization, and shared infrastructure is spread across more than a million customers. A Milwaukee-only utility would concentrate many of those costs on Milwaukee ratepayers alone, and the public deserves clear answers on what that means for monthly bills.

•       With the loss of system-wide scale, under what realistic scenario do Milwaukee customers see lower rates rather than higher ones?

•       Acquisition could require billions of dollars in new debt. What is the impact on the city’s finances, and are taxpayers, not only ratepayers, exposed if revenues fall short?

FRWD believes Milwaukee can learn from communities that have already explored this path. The national track record is sobering: by one widely cited count, more than 60 cities have attempted to replace an investor-owned utility with a public one since 2000, and only a handful of small municipalities succeeded. Boulder, Colorado, is the most studied recent example. After voters approved the effort in 2011, the city spent roughly a decade and tens of millions of dollars before voters chose to end the effort in 2020.

The history closer to home points the same direction. Wisconsin is home to 81 municipal electric utilities, and FRWD is proud to count public power among its coalition partners. But almost all of those utilities trace their origins to the early decades of electrification, roughly the 1890s through the 1930s. No major Wisconsin city has stood up a new municipal electric utility by acquiring an established investor-owned system in the modern era.

“We are raising these questions because we want this conversation grounded in facts, not slogans,” Nation said. “The people of Milwaukee, and the workers who serve them, deserve a debate that takes the risks as seriously as the goals.”