ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. \u2014 The group looking to drop Duke Energy as St. Petersburg\u2019s energy provider launched a petition on Wednesday to create a ballot measure giving voters the decision on the utility provider\u2019s future in the city.<\/p>\n
The organization \u201cDump Duke\u201d says there are over 30 publicly run utility providers in Florida and claim they provide lower rates and higher reliability.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For the last 30 years, St. Pete has been in what’s called a “franchise agreement” with Duke Energy. It allows only Duke to operate, install and maintain energy infrastructure within the city.<\/p>\n
That agreement ended in August.<\/p>\n
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It would be an expensive switch.<\/p>\n
A Duke-commissioned study found that it could cost the city $2.7 billion and $4.1 billion to create its own city-run service. And that\u2019s on top of the nearly $600,000 the city already spent on its own study exploring the idea.<\/p>\n
Some residents said that is a switch the city can\u2019t afford.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got a bunch of other costs with infrastructure that we need to address,\u201d said Jason Mathis, the St. Petersburg Downtown Partnership CEO. \u201cSo, I look at all the costs the city has. I look at where our current taxes are, and I just wonder where are we going to get the money to pay for this.\u201d<\/p>\n
The group is trying to garner 16,200 signatures to get on the 2028 ballot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. \u2014 The group looking to drop Duke Energy as St. Petersburg\u2019s energy provider launched a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":388552,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[4075,274,558,28,2287,115,596,275,202,204,203,199,201,200,135,278],"class_list":["post-388551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-ap-top-news","tag-app-top-stories","tag-business","tag-florida","tag-local-politics","tag-news","tag-pinellas-county","tag-spectrum-news-staff","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news","tag-tampa","tag-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388551\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/388552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}