PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • June 26, 2023
Small-business owners are always worrying about work. 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. We’ll be subjected to an untried, untested idea fraught with many unknowns. The biggest unknown is cost. Estimates are all in the billions of dollars. 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. All that time, businesses will have to keep operating without knowing what to expect next. We certainly can’t afford to take a multibillion-dollar risk on a bad idea. ~ Marcia Feller, Falmouth