The year was 2023, and utility companies in Maine were staring down the political equivalent of the barrel of a gun.
They were among the least popular utilities in America, and residents fed up with high electric bills sprouted a grassroots campaign to put them out of business. If voters approved a question on the ballot, the companies would be kicked out of the state, and the grid would be acquired by a publicly owned nonprofit called Pine Tree Power.
Facing this threat, the companies summoned an army of political strategists. One of their leaders was Willy Ritch — a longtime Democratic strategist who headed a group funded by Maine’s largest utility.
Lately, as both St. Petersburg and Clearwater officials mull dropping Duke Energy, Ritch’s fingerprints have appeared on the work of local pro-utility efforts in Florida. Activists who worked on the Pine Tree Power campaign said they see direct parallels between the strategies they combated in Maine and the tactics of the burgeoning pro-Duke Energy push in Pinellas County.
Ultimately, the power companies prevailed in Maine, after pouring tens of millions into nonstop messaging that warned of exorbitant costs and more frequent blackouts if the utilities lost control. The defeat of the referendum was a victory for the utility industry, which uses examples of failed takeover attempts to warn other cities and states that it can’t be done.
The events from the Maine campaign could now serve as a preview of what’s to come in Florida if the two cities continue to investigate wresting their grids from Duke.
“Fear is their No. 1 thing,” said Jonathan Fulford, a retired building contractor who co-founded the group Our Power to push for the 2023 ballot question in Maine. “Casting doubt and telling people, ‘This will cost more, and this will be unreliable.’ How can anybody be for something like that?”
Who is Willy Ritch?
Ritch’s potential involvement with the pro-Duke Energy Florida campaigns has not been previously reported, nor is his name listed on any of the outward marketing by the Pinellas Energy Alliance — the organization with Clearwater and St. Petersburg offshoots working to oppose city-run grids.
But Ritch’s name was listed as an “author” on a mostly hidden portion of the Pinellas Energy Alliance website that could only be accessed through its sitemap, which is like a website’s digital blueprint.
When reached by phone by a Tampa Bay Times reporter, Ritch asked that questions be sent via email. He didn’t respond to multiple follow-up messages. The Pinellas Energy Alliance didn’t respond to emails asking about Ritch. Duke Energy Florida declined to answer questions about Ritch as well, directing the Times to the alliance.
There are other signs that suggest his involvement in Florida.
The same email address — made of an ID number with 11 numbers and letters — owns the domain names for Ritch’s company website, Salt Public Affairs, plus the websites for the Pinellas Energy Alliance and the St. Petersburg and Clearwater energy alliances, records show.
After he left a previous career as a local morning radio host, Ritch worked as a strategist for years for Democratic politicians in Maine — a common attribute among many of the political operatives who worked for the pro-utility effort. Maine Affordable Energy also hired a Democratic consulting firm, Left Hook, according to news coverage at the time. It recruited a Democratic state lawmaker to become a spokesperson for its cause, despite the fact that she had previously voted for a bill to break off from the investor-owned utilities.
“Republicans tend to prefer the private sector to the public sector,” said Seth Berry, the executive director of Our Power, which advocates for pro-consumer policies in Maine, and a former Democratic state representative.
“The whole strategy is about peeling off enough Democrats and independents to win the battle.”
The Times sent emails, texts and left voicemails for five strategists who worked with Ritch in 2023 to ask about criticisms of these tactics. None responded.
The playbook: big spending, local voices
Marley Price, a St. Petersburg resident and organizer with the Dump Duke campaign, said her group has been comparing notes with activists in Maine and elsewhere to prepare for what’s to come.
“Investor-owned utilities have been running the same playbook for decades,” she said in a text. “Learning from other communities has taken away a lot of the guesswork. We know the tactics, we know the players, and we know how these campaigns tend to escalate.”
Maine energy activists repeatedly emphasized that, above all else, the utilities’ strategy prioritized one thing: a deluge of political spending.
Two Maine utility companies, Central Maine Power and Versant, funded groups like Ritch’s that collectively spent roughly $40 million to defeat the 2023 referendum, news outlets reported. Both utilities are owned by larger parent companies that provide electricity to millions of homes in other states and countries.
In comparison, Our Power was a grassroots effort without high-powered political donors, the former organizers said. They raised about $1 million.
All that money allowed the pro-utility groups to blanket the airwaves with ads. Over and over, those ads hammered a daunting figure: $13.5 billion, the amount that it would apparently take for a consumer-owned utility to buy all the grid equipment from the utilities.
But the number came from a utility-funded report, produced by Concentric Energy Advisors, a firm with a history of arriving at soaring numbers for utilities fighting public power campaigns. Our Power argued that the number was wildly overinflated, especially because the true sum would be determined through complex negotiations, possibly in front of a judge.
Berry, the former Maine legislator who leads Our Power, said it didn’t matter. The objective was sticker shock.
“Every person in Maine by the end of the referendum knew what that number meant … because there were so many mailings, there were so many TV ads, there were so many radio ads,” he said. “There was so much chatter about that number that people began to believe it.”
There are direct parallels in Florida.
Duke Energy has commissioned a report from that same research firm preferred by utilities, Concentric Energy Advisors, which estimated that it could cost the city of Clearwater more than $1 billion to take over the grid.
Clearwater residents found that number printed on door hangers left by canvassers earlier this year, along with other claims about the cost that Clearwater Mayor Bruce Rector has called misleading or false. A separate study commissioned by the city found that leaving Duke could save residents millions on their electric bills.
Another tactic that some Maine activists said was a trademark of Ritch was “astroturfing” — a political term for making corporate-funded efforts seem like grassroots.
Berry said that during the campaign, he noticed a surge in social media accounts, or even commenters on local news websites, who supported the utilities. But it was unclear if they were real residents.
Maine Affordable Energy paid three former legislators to write op-eds and speak publicly for its cause, an investigation by the Portland Press Herald and Floodlight News found.
The unions representing lineworkers also supported the utilities, after the pro-utility groups convinced them that a consumer-owned grid would threaten their organizing rights, according to Fulford, formerly of Our Power.
“I will give (them) credit, it was a brilliant strategy,” Fulford said. “It was really terrible to be on the opposite side of the AFL-CIO and the electric workers union, when we had worked really hard to make sure the language in the proposed legislation would only benefit them.”
In Florida, the canvassers who went door-to-door in Clearwater and St. Petersburg were tasked with getting as many residents as possible to submit pledges or handwritten letters saying they wanted to keep Duke Energy, according to ex-canvasser David Kovalak. A long list of names would bolster the campaign’s assertions that Duke has robust resident support.
Kovalak previously told the Times that he misled people to get more names and even forged a letter while he worked for the St. Pete Energy Alliance. That group, like the Clearwater and Pinellas energy alliances, has declined to answer questions about its source of funding.
Ana Gibbs, a spokesperson for Duke Energy Florida, has said those groups are “not controlled” by Duke, but has not answered questions from the Times about whether Duke is giving them money.
National implications
As with Maine three years ago, affordable energy advocates said they will be watching Florida closely as the fights in St. Petersburg and Clearwater play out. So will the utility industry.
St. Petersburg is looking through bids submitted by consultants for a potential study that could estimate the pros and cons of the city leaving Duke. The City Council has approved the process for looking into this study but has not yet voted to spend money to complete one.
Clearwater has already finished such a study and is working on an appraisal of all Duke equipment within city limits.
The last time a Florida city broke away from an investor-owned utility was 2005 in Winter Park, near Orlando, after voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot question there. Winter Park has since become a national example of a place where removing the utility company led to better outcomes. Its residents pay 28% less than Duke customers, and the city has buried almost all power lines underground, City Manager Randy Knight previously told the Times.
The email address that owns Pinellas-area domains for the energy alliances also owns several other website names, according to site registration paperwork.
They include the names of other cities throughout the country, like San Diego and Ann Arbor, Michigan, where public power campaigns have also raised the question of leaving their utility companies.