By Courtney Crouse
Communications Manager

I sat down with James Robinson, the General Manager of Holden Municipal Light Department, to talk about how he got started with the light department and how they celebrate Public Power week. Every year they hold a public lunch at the local Senior Center in Holden.  They’ve been doing it for quite a while, even before James started and it’s always a huge hit! Although the Senior Center holds a number of events for the wider Wachusett area, this event is only available to Holden residents. It has become so popular that they must take reservations and sometimes a wait list is needed. 

Unfortunately, not all of the Holden staff can be involved as they would prefer not to close the offices. So the few that do go to the event help with everything including set-up, serving the food, and cleaning up after the event is over. Jim says, "It gives them a chance to mingle with the customers. It’s usually a pretty good meal."

This is not the only way the light department is involved with the community. About 15 years ago they took all the overhead lines on main street and moved them underground. Every Christmas they put up the holiday wreaths along Main Street and they put up roughly 150 flags to be displayed between Memorial Day and the 4th of July. They also put up any town banners and do some modest light work at the schools, such as changing bulbs. "We’re 30 square miles.  We’re what you call the classic good story for public power because we have 8 linemen who all they do is serve the town of Holden, so if we have an outage we’re there within minutes," comments Jim. 

Jim has been the light manager going on six years, so all of the great outreach programs they participate in started long before he began.  Jim is no stranger to Holden since he has lived in Holden for 28 years. He was working at National Grid in Westborough (when they were located there) up until 2007 when he retired. He took a couple of years off and during that time he did help the light department out in some situations. In 2008, when Holden had a really horrific ice storm, he came down to help and his wife went to the senior center to help out, and that’s how he originally got involved. After that, he was brought back in as a contractor to help them file for their FEMA recovery because of that storm. Jim says, "That was kind of my way of starting to learn about the light department. The position opened up and I became the manager."

The Holden Municipal Light Department is a moderate size municipal with about 20 employees in total.  The building in which they are located, which is 12 years old, used to be a school. There was a little bit of concern about putting a light department in that residential area so they had to make the building look nice. All of their trucks are inside and all of their poles and transformers are stored in another building in Holden right around the corner. Jim comments that it’s important to be a good neighbor because the town itself is about 18,000 people and they have 8,000 electric customers. 

The light department has plenty of programs they are proud of, especially their robust net metering program. They have 50 houses that have roof top solar systems which is actually not bad for a town their size. They have the same generous net meeting policy that National Grid has although Jim goes on to say, "It varies from department to department because some folks aren’t comfortable giving full credit back for electricity." Holden believes that for now it makes sense to do that; however, it might change in the future. Jim is a big advocate of having a plan like this and he wants to give people as much incentive as they reasonably can and it’s become really popular in their town. 

They also have photovoltaic systems on three of their town buildings, which was put in five years ago. They took their old police station and converted it to a recreation department and last winter they put a brand new system in the building. "We’re kinda proud of that. We think it’s an important thing for us to support the town," explains Jim.