The Importance of the APPA Legislative Rally

by Mike Kirkwood; General Manager at Pascoag Utility District and Vice-Chair of the NEPPA Legislative Committee

APPA’s Legislative Rally in Washington DC is quickly coming upon us. This year’s rally is scheduled for March 11-14, and is an extremely important event for our public power industry. Our time spent in Washington during this highly coordinated rally allows APPA and NEPPA members to impress on members of Congress how important the public power model is to its consumers, and to key them in and educate them on the issues of utmost concern to us. Our hope is always that our congressional delegation will remember these discussions when they deliberate and vote on issues that affect this industry. Because of the concerted effort to have public power entities from all 50 states represented at the rally, we increase the likelihood that members of Congress will remember and consider our issues during their debates, both in the various congressional committees and sub-committees, and finally when it comes time to take a full senate or house vote on a particular bill.

APPA organizes many events during the rally week such as legislative and regulatory breakfasts, lunches and general meetings, many of which feature speakers who are industry experts. These events allow the leadership folks from public power utilities across the nation to discuss and learn from each other as they plan for their meetings with their individual members of Congress.

Our NEPPA legislative team, working with its DC lobbying firm Morgan Meguire and the folks from APPA, takes a very serious interest in helping our entire New England membership to focus and prepare for the issues of importance to public power here in the Northeast. Many times the issues are the same as the national issues, but we often have a particular issue or issues to add to this list that become important from the New England perspective. An example of this is the topic of natural gas infrastructure in the Northeast, since we sit at the end of the natural gas pipelines and congestion on the pipelines can affect our power prices so dramatically.

From my personal experience during the last two legislative rallies, working with our NEPPA team and Morgan Meguire allowed me to become fluent in the issues, and I was completely comfortable as I sat down with Rhode Island’s four members of Congress and their aides to discuss the issues we in the industry have been most concerned with. As in anything else of importance that we do in our jobs, preparation is the key to carrying out our goals, and being prepared for these meetings allows NEPPA members to have succinct, focused discussions for the limited amount of time our busy congressional delegation can afford us.

All of our NEPPA members will be hearing from the NEPPA Legislative Committee over the next month or so prior to the rally as we develop information and talking points on our key issues. The items we will be keying up for discussion include FERC issues such as transmission rates and the ISO budget, LIHEAP funding, the threat to municipal bond tax exempt status, new hydro legislation, cyber security, natural gas/electric coordination and the CFTC rules evolution as the Dodd-Frank trading laws continue to be rolled out.

So stay tuned and get ready for another very successful rally in DC. On behalf of the Legislative Committee, we hope many of you will be able to participate in Washington as we spread our message far and wide in the halls of Congress.