BY ADAM ATKINSON
North Country This Week

POTSDAM — The town attorney says the town should get more information before contracting with a firm to handle the municipality’s community choice aggregation program.

The discussion began at the Sept. 13 town board meeting when Town Supervisor Anne Carvill shared a letter from Joule Community Power, a firm which administers a large number of community choice aggregation power arrangements for municipalities around the state. The letter details an ongoing lawsuit Joule has launched against Columbia Utilities Power, LLC which supplied power to a CCA downstate in the New Paltz area. Columbia reportedly broke a contractual obligation to provide the power which prompted the lawsuit.

Read more about the lawsuit at https://bit.ly/3BOCRIL .

Representatives from Joule have been present at board meetings in Potsdam and Canton over the last year, and have offered their services to the town of Potsdam after that municipality approved setting up a CCA program.

Municipal community choice aggregation programs, authorized by the state last year, allow local governments to pass local laws to set up buying clubs for their residents to purchase cheap or renewable energy on the open market. The buying club can potentially give the residents more power to find the best pricing for electricity on the open market.

Under the town’s program, citizens would automatically be enrolled in the CCA and would have to actively opt-out.

The town has issued a request for proposals from companies to provide CCA administration and negotiation services to find power on behalf of the town.

That RFP is on the town website at https://bit.ly/3dCOKJp . The deadline for submissions is 4 p.m. Friday, Sept. 30.

“So I asked Frank (Cappello, town attorney) about it already and asked him to weigh in on this, because thus far we have not gotten a proposal in regards to our request for proposals to look into community choice aggregation,” said Carvill. “So this was of interest to me because this company (Columbia) was obviously employed by Joule. The fault was that it impacted these communities.”

Cappello said there was not any information about why Columbia defaulted on its contract with Joule.

“What worries me (about CCAs) is you’re never going to deal with the direct supplier of the energy,” the attorney said. “You are going to deal with an in-between person who is going to negotiate.”

“I think it's going to be hard for us to meet our goal of completely all renewable and keep the prices down,” Cappello said. “You would think with a big power project in Massena we would be good to go, but we don’t get all of that power.”

“So I think we just have to be cautious. Remember… you haven’t sat all the way down and said we are going to do it (contract with Joule),” Cappello said.

“I worry about the ‘opt-out’ clause,” the attorney said. He said residents may decide to opt out if they feel they are saddled with paying for other CCA members’ electricity if a supplier goes bankrupt, can’t supply power at an agreed rate and breaches a contract with a CCA administrator. “Sooner or later that bill will have to be paid and if that company goes bankrupt, they won’t be paying it. Joule won’t pay it. So will they pass that back onto the customers, which will be the rest of us?” Cappello said.

“I think we need more information,” he said.

“Any information I get I’m sharing with you, because this, at this point, is a question mark,” Carvill said.

Town Councilman Marty Miller suggested the town reach out to the New York Power Authority to come and educate the town on how to proceed.