ST. PETERSBURG — On Oct. 4 in South St. Petersburg’s Wildwood Park, 16 members of a group calling itself “Dump Duke” gathered to share strategy before pairing up to canvass in nearby neighborhoods.

They were there to inform residents and ratepayers frustrated about the prices and services provided by Duke Energy that they could do something about it by signing a petition.

The signature drive was part of a grassroots effort to demonstrate to the City of St. Petersburg legitimate interest within the community to seriously explore jettisoning Duke — their longtime energy provider — when the 30-year franchise agreement between the two parties expires next summer.

“It’s one of the easiest things to canvas for,” said Dump Duke organizer Marley Price, comparing it to her experience knocking on doors last year for an unsuccessful candidate for St. Petersburg City Council.

“With Duke, everyone knows them. Most people have had a bad experience with them, so it’s really to relate that back and tell them something new — that it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Those and earlier efforts have spurred several members of the City Council to take up the idea. The board voted, 5-3, in August to call on Mayor Ken Welch to seek bids for a feasibility study evaluating the pros and cons of leaving Duke and forming a municipal utility, something that 33 other communities now operate in Florida.

Consultant study

That early vote came as Pinellas County’s next largest city — Clearwater — has received its own, long-anticipated feasibility study prepared by NewGen Strategies & Solutions about what would happen if that city ended its relationship with Duke Energy, whose franchise agreement expires at the end of this year.

Projecting a 30-year period beginning in 2026, the report concluded that if the city dropped Duke Energy, its effective rates over the next five years would end up approximately 7% lower on average than the Duke rate on an annualized basis. After that, the effective rate would run approximately 18% lower on average than the Duke rate for the remainder of the 30-year period.

The study values the cost of acquiring Duke property at $572 million but also notes that the real cost of Duke’s assets could run between 50% lower or 100% higher than its estimate — meaning around $1 billion. That was the estimate offered by an outside energy consultant hired by Duke Energy of Clearwater’s costs.

In Florida, 54 utilities provide electricity to residents. They include the big four investor-owned providers — Duke Energy Florida, Florida Power & Light, Florida Public Utilities, and Tampa Electric Co. (TECO). Those four serve approximately 75% of the state’s population, with the remaining 25% provided by 33 municipal electric utilities and 16 rural electric cooperatives, according to the Florida Municipal Electric Association.

While it would be convenient if an investor-owned utility sold its private assets to a public entity, it never works that way. If Clearwater municipalizes its electric utility, it would have to go the eminent domain route — by far the most expensive option, as Duke officials have been explicit in stressing that they have no intention of selling their system.

“We know it’s going to be a fight and it’s going to take time,” said Clearwater City Council member David Albritton after the board approved the study. “It’s a risk. We all know that. But it could be a lower rate.”

The NextGen study is loaded with caveats, however, including an explicit statement that “there can be no guarantee that Clearwater … will achieve cost savings.”

Winter Park’s success

Some of Florida’s largest communities, such as Orlando, Jacksonville, and Tallahassee, have run their own municipal utilities for decades, but not a single one has launched since Winter Park, a northern suburb of Orlando, did so in 2005. That took place following a referendum approved by 69% of the electorate in 2003.

Randy Knight, city manager for Winter Park, described recently on the Florida City and County Management Association podcast how its municipal utility has buried 80% of its power lines underground over the past 20 years, which “has been just huge in reliability … and not having storm outages at all has been fantastic.”

“In this last storm, we had 271 customers out of power after the hurricane came through, and had all of that restored in 12 hours,” he said (the Winter Park municipality serves approximately 15,000 customers). “None of those outages were in the underground part of the system … . It was a testament to what we were doing was the right thing and, you know, the community loves that.”

“As of May, our rates were 32% lower than Duke Energy’s and 2% lower than the statewide average for municipal utilities,” Knight added to WKMG television in August.

Nationally, the last local community to form its own electric utility was the Jefferson County Public Utility District in Washington state in 2013.

Boulder’s decade-long experiment

There is no greater example of how hard it can be to break away from an investor-owned utility than what happened in Boulder, Colorado, which spent nearly a decade trying to break away from Xcel Energy. That effort ended in 2020 when voters approved a settlement with Xcel to trigger the reinstatement of a franchise agreement abandoned a decade earlier.

“Be rational,” suggests former Boulder City Council member Bob Yates, when asked what words of advice he would give Clearwater and St. Petersburg council members who support municipalization efforts. “Be objective and clear-eyed about your evaluation, not only of your goals and objectives, but also how long it will take and how much it will cost.”

In the case of Boulder, taxpayers approved $29 million for the losing effort. Yates says that when investor-owned utilities decide to fight, they won’t give up easily.

Boulder residents pushed the local government to separate from Xcel because of frustration with the lack of urgency the power company expended in pursuing electricity from green power sources like wind and solar.

Yates, who served on the Boulder City Council from 2015 to 2023, said that while he personally never supported the effort, he wishes Pinellas County lawmakers the best of luck. “I don’t think it was a good use of time or money, but the situation may be very different in Florida, so I wouldn’t want to presume to tell the good folks of Florida how to handle their affairs,” he said.

Ursula Schryver is senior vice president for education, training, and events for the American Public Power Association, a D.C. trade group representing the nation’s 2,000 public power utilities. While there is a sense of urgency with the impending end of the franchise agreements in Clearwater and St. Petersburg, it’s generally “a long process and requires a lot of commitment on the part of the community and leadership and so forth,” she said.

St. Petersburg Mayor Welch, who at one point in his career worked as an accountant with the old Florida Power Corp., has suggested establishing a new 10-year agreement with Duke next year to ensure that residents could rely on “stable and dependable services” as the future of energy in the city is debated. But Schryver says that rather than signing a shorter franchise agreement, “now’s the time” for the city to begin negotiating its wants and needs.

“They have to continue serving the community — Duke or whomever the incumbent is has to continue to serve the community, even without a franchise agreement,” she said. “I would suggest negotiating and continuing to look at the option of forming a public power utility without signing that franchise agreement vs. signing a five-year one and then you’re going to be in the same place that you’re in now, five years down the line.”

That’s what the city of Tampa did during the aughts. After its 20-year franchise agreement with TECO expired in 2006, the city spent two years negotiating with the utility before signing a new 25-year agreement in 2008.

St. Petersburg City Council member Richie Floyd says the fact that the city’s franchise agreement is scheduled to end next year gives the city “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to look into the city’s options.”

“It’s not a radical idea or anything, although I think it’s an important one,” he said.

St. Petersburg City Council member Brandi Gabbard is also enthusiastic about pursuing municipal power.

“What the residents are asking of us is for us to really be able to control costs and to be able to give them a level of service that they are demanding, and so I think that we need to listen to our residents,” she said. “We need to explore it. I’ve been very honest with residents that I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t know what the future holds.”

Gabbard expressed dissatisfaction that the city hadn’t as of early October even set a timeline for sending out the request for proposals for a consultant study. “There’s no guarantees that this is actually going to come to fruition, but for us to drag our feet and not respond the way that residents are asking us to, I think is doing a disservice.”

Orlando Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani argues that having a local utility through which residents can exercise direct influence “is always preferable to relying on the Public Service Commission as your advocate.”

“Most constituents don’t even know the Public Service Commission exists but having a local utility board that you can present to, engage with, and really influence leads to better consumer experiences,” she said.

After the Clearwater City Council voted to begin a formal reappraisal of Duke’s distribution system, Duke said in a written statement that creating a city-owned electric utility would be “enormously expensive, risky, and take years to complete.”

“As we have said before, our system is not for sale. That position has not changed. Duke Energy remains committed to serving our Clearwater and St. Petersburg customers, and we look forward to working with both cities on the best path forward — which we believe is renewing the franchise agreement.”

Pinellas County residents are also being hit by social media ads from “We Stand for Energy,” a campaign created by the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), calling on them to “Tell the Council: Don’t Waste Taxpayer Money” by pursuing municipalizing.

“As feasibility studies consistently show, municipalization efforts threaten to increase customer costs by billions of dollars without improving service,” said an EEI spokesperson when asked about the campaign. He declined to respond to a question about how much EEI was investing in the effort.

Meanwhile, Dump Duke advocates say they’re not relenting, although Price concedes it’s discouraging that Mayor Welch has declined to meet with the group.

“Hopefully, there will still be enough public pressure still that they have to do something,” she said.

On Oct. 4, as Dump Duke advocate Jason Scott began knocking on doors in South St. Petersburg, he met a man who said that he used to work for Duke as a lineman but now works across the bay for Tampa Electric.

“What’s your opinion of Duke?” Scott asked him.

“It’s a good company to work for, but I understand that a lot of residents were complaining about high bills and stuff,” the man, who did not want to be identified, responded. “I do understand why.”

When Scott asked him about the cost of his monthly bill, the man quickly jumped in.

“Of course I want cheaper bills, but at the same time that Duke kind of monopolizes everything. I don’t see a way to get out of the situation without it being more expensive.”

Nevertheless, he ended up signing Scott’s petition.