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Tired of pricey TV ads trying to mislead us about the clear benefits of Pine Tree Power? We haven’t seen anything yet. We complain a lot about big money controlling our lives. The question is, are we going to do anything about it when it’s staring us right in the face?
Versant and CMP have the bucks to hire high-priced lawyers and pump thousands into slick ads, potentially to confuse us into voting against our own best interests. CMP has had the worst customer satisfaction of any similar utility in the country four years in a row and some of the most frequent power outages of any state in the nation. Nebraska has public power and some of the most reliable electric service in the country. How obviously bad does it have to get before we stop letting ourselves be hustled? Remember, every message we get from them is likely to have been professionally tailored to push our fear buttons.
Pine Tree Power has lots of bipartisan support. That’s right, this is not a left-right fight: It’s average citizens against foreign corporations who send their profits out of Maine. One last thing: those line workers we’ve seen for decades replacing poles, and stringing power lines 30 feet up in the air in the swirling snow; they’re not going anywhere. The Pine Tree Power proposal that we’ll vote on in November, not only protects those worker’s jobs, bargaining rights, benefits, pensions, etc., it expands on them.
Christopher Wright
Belfast