The knocks on the doors have echoed throughout St. Petersburg and Clearwater.
Across those communities, a campaign is underway to sow doubts about dropping Duke Energy as a citywide electricity provider, efforts the cities have undertaken in the name of lower power bills.
Paid canvassers have left a trail of glossy door hangers that warn of higher property taxes and billions in debt “that could take generations to pay off.” Residents have seen more than $50,000 worth of ads on their Facebook and Instagram feeds.
But no one seems to want to take credit for funding it.
The campaigns are run by recently formed groups called the St. Pete Energy Alliance and the Clearwater Energy Alliance, both under a Pinellas umbrella organization classified as a business trade group. Unlike charities or political committees, these types of nonprofits don’t have to disclose the identities of their donors in public records, causing them to sometimes be called “dark money” groups.
Locals, including Clearwater Mayor Bruce Rector and St. Petersburg City Council member Richie Floyd, suspect Duke Energy is funding the effort. But the company has declined to answer specific questions about any financial involvement. So has an industry lobbying group.
Who is behind the push remains a mystery — even to the door-to-door canvassers spreading the message. Some of those workers were recruited in the parking lot of a plasma donation center in St. Petersburg, where people give vials of blood for quick cash.
One former canvasser, St. Petersburg resident David Kovalak, told the Tampa Bay Times the groups are employing people desperate for money. They were paid hourly but also entered into raffles for collecting a high number of signatures showing support, he said, prompting canvassers to say whatever it took to get homeowners signed up — even if it meant distorting already vague talking points.
“I was 100% misleading people to just sign this thing that they have no clue what they’re doing, just so that I can pay my rent,” Kovalak said in an interview. He was recruited by the St. Pete Energy Alliance after donating plasma, the medical wrap still on his forearm while he rang doorbells.
While speaking with the petitioners on his doorstep, Andy Oliver said he pulled up state business filings on his phone for the Pinellas Energy Alliance, the parent group of the St. Pete and Clearwater branches. October records listed a woman named Lisa Lohss as the “incorporator.” Lohss has a public LinkedIn profile that displays Duke Energy as her former employer.
The pitch “felt really deceptive and dishonest,” said Oliver, pastor of Allendale United Methodist Church in St. Petersburg. Since the interaction, he said he plans to get more involved to support the efforts to leave Duke Energy.
“When they came to my door and showed that they were willing to go to these types of lengths to deceive the public, it’s not fighting fair,” Oliver said.
Rector, the Clearwater mayor, said he’s heard from constituents about the canvassers.
“I’ve had citizens complain to me about how they were presenting themselves,” Rector said. “We’ve had a lot of confusion in the community.”
When asked about Duke Energy’s relationship to the energy alliances, the utility distanced itself from the effort.
“The alliances you asked about are not controlled by Duke Energy,” said company spokesperson Ana Gibbs in an email. “Lisa Lohss is not a Duke Energy employee and has not been for years. Duke Energy Florida only uses rate payer funds for providing reliable and safe electric services, in full accordance with applicable law.”
Gibbs twice declined to answer follow-up questions about whether Duke was contributing to the campaign without fully controlling the groups, saying reporters should contact the energy alliances.
After a Times reporter tried to reach Lohss by phone and through her Facebook account, the Clearwater Energy Alliance sent an email saying she would not speak to a reporter.
The Times emailed questions to the energy alliance groups, asking multiple times about the groups’ funding. In response, the groups sent a statement that did not discuss financial information but said the alliances “include more than 1,500 residents, along with local businesses and organizations.”
“These alliances exist for one reason: residents are concerned about proposals for city takeovers of the electric grid,” said Sean Schrader, a spokesperson for the groups and a Clearwater resident. “A takeover would cost billions of dollars, and one way or another, local residents would pay — through rates, taxes or long-term city debt. That’s not abstract. It’s permanent.”
Schrader also sent the Times a polling report the St. Pete Energy Alliance commissioned from Morning Consult, an opinion research firm in Washington, D.C.
The polling found that “emphasizing the financial risks of the proposal” prompted residents to express more opposition to the cities taking over local grids. The report also suggested this process could put St. Petersburg more than $2 billion in debt. But St. Petersburg officials have not yet commissioned a study to estimate costs, and Schrader said that figure was an approximation based on a separate report paid for by Duke in Clearwater.
The Times visited a canvassing office for the energy alliances in the garage of a northern St. Petersburg triplex. The walls were plastered with motivational posters — “Start every conversation with a smile,” one said. Canvassers in matching T-shirts sat in metal chairs, listening to a briefing. But after the journalists requested entry, workers asked the Times to leave and promptly closed the garage door.
Last week, Floyd stood with protesters across the street from Duke Energy’s St. Petersburg office, telling local TV cameras that the canvassing efforts were spreading unacceptable disinformation, such as the notion that leaving Duke would increase property taxes. Floyd has said that the idea the city would hike taxes for this purpose is “silly,” adding that a city-run utility would be funded by residents’ utility bills.
“These are the flyers people are taking door-to-door to my constituents’ homes — and telling them lies,“ he said during the news conference. “I’m asking for Duke’s front groups and Duke Energy to not fund these lies and to not participate in them.”
A reporter then asked if he believed Duke was directly responsible.
“I couldn’t tell you for sure that’s who it is,” Floyd replied. “But every arrow points in that direction.”
A mysterious campaign
Several homeowners told the Times that canvassers were unable to answer basic questions about the background of the energy alliances.
“Do you happen to know who is behind this?” St. Petersburg resident Scott Barancik asked the woman who knocked at his door, he said.
“I don’t really know,” she’d replied, according to Barancik. When he noticed a small-print disclaimer on the door hanger that the Pinellas Energy Alliance was “a 501c6 organization,” he offered to look up that term so they could learn together what it meant.
According to the Internal Revenue Service, it’s a type of nonprofit for business leagues and chambers of commerce. That’s the same classification as the Edison Electric Institute, a national utility industry lobbying group that counts Duke Energy as a member.
The institute began running social media ads in September, the same month that Clearwater officials received a report from consultants that found forming a municipal-run utility could save residents millions on their electric bills.
Those ads have since fallen off. But they were replaced with ones paid for by the Clearwater Energy Alliance, with similar wording:
“A government takeover of Clearwater’s energy grid could cost more than $1 billion, leaving families and businesses to pay through higher taxes and energy costs,” read an ad paid for by the utility institute.
“A government takeover of Clearwater’s power grid could cost $1.1 billion, leaving taxpayers to pick up the bill,” one from the Clearwater Energy Alliance reads.
The Edison Electric Institute declined to answer emailed questions asking if it was involved with the energy alliances.
Elected officials cry foul
Regardless of who’s behind the groups, local officials said they were concerned with their messaging and recruitment tactics.
Door hangers distributed in Clearwater warn residents that dropping Duke would put Clearwater in $1.1 billion worth of debt, equivalent to about $10,000 per resident. The billion-dollar price tag comes from a study Duke commissioned from a consulting firm that has done similar work for utility companies across the country.
Its findings contradict the study commissioned by the city.
Mayor Rector said Clearwater would not incur debt in the process of creating its own utility and that there wouldn’t be a cost to taxpayers. The utility would recoup the costs of acquiring the grid by issuing bonds, and residents would contribute solely through their electric bills.
The Clearwater City Council voted last fall to get an appraisal of Duke’s assets and create a potential timeline for a purchase offer. The appraisal is scheduled to be completed by the end of February, according to a city webpage.
Rector, who has said he believes Duke is behind the canvassers, said the increasing cost of energy remains a primary concern for residents.
“They don’t appear to be answering or addressing that question,” Rector, a Republican, said. “It’s just about trying to campaign against us providing (electricity).”
Kovalak, the former canvasser, said he initially signed up with the group because he needed cash. But his suspicions grew that the message he was spreading was inaccurate, and a dispute over his hours was the last straw.
“I do feel bad now,” he said, adding that he’s considering going back to some of the homeowners he canvassed to try to correct the record.
The pledges and letters of support from residents will be submitted to St. Petersburg and Clearwater city halls, Kovalak said, to bolster the alliances’ claims that scores of locals are on their side. But he alleged that because canvassers were rewarded with more work if they collected more letters, sometimes they’d sign for people they’d never really canvassed.
“I forged a letter,” he said. “I’ve seen other people forge a letter.”
The St. Pete Energy Alliance pushed back against Kovalak’s allegations, saying in an email that he had been let go and his statements about fabricated letters “are completely false.”
“When canvassers return from a shift with letters written by the people they talked to, the supervisors on the program place calls to every single person who wrote a letter to confirm its authenticity,” the statement read. “In addition, the devices our canvassers use while knocking on doors have built in GPS, so the supervisors on the team can confirm that canvassers are visiting the homes they were assigned to.”
Floyd, the St. Petersburg City Council member, took offense to the groups’ recruiting canvassers from a plasma donation center, calling it “predatory” and “disgusting.”
Two people outside Octapharma Plasma at Central Avenue and 34th Street N. in St. Petersburg confirmed to the Times that they had been approached in the parking lot by representatives from the St. Pete Energy Alliance.
“It’s the lowest of the low,” said Floyd, a Democrat. “Preying on people who are in times of need … to try to get them to work for a corporation that is raising our rates and screwing our residents and making them poorer — it’s the worst form of capitalism I could possibly imagine.”
When asked about Floyd’s comments, the St. Pete alliance disputed that it was targeting the plasma center, saying that Octapharma is part of a bigger plaza.
“That is a shopping center with a Verizon store, a Family Dollar, and a Chinese restaurant. They recruited workers at that shopping center and at the Walmart across the street,” the statement read. “It is disrespectful to the people we have hired to suggest or report that they have somehow been exploited.”
Several storefronts in that plaza are vacant, including the two closest to Octapharma. Both the Chinese restaurant and the Family Dollar are permanently closed.
Times staff photojournalist Dirk Shadd contributed to this report.
Emily L. Mahoney is the energy reporter. Reach her at emahoney@tampabay.com.
Colbi Edmonds is the Clearwater reporter. Reach her at cedmonds@tampabay.com.