Mayor Evans, City Council calls for investigation into RG&E

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WROC) — Mayor Malik Evans and the Rochester City Council called on the New York State Public Service Commission (PSC) to investigate RG&E.

The statement from Mayor Evans questions RG&E’s commitment to Rochester. Evans and the Council are requesting that the PSC fund a study to evaluate a municipal takeover of the utility’s operations.

“Our community is being failed by RG&E,” Mayor Evans and City Council wrote in a letter to PSC Secretary Michelle Phillips. “Please recognize that we are in a crisis. This frustration is not fleeting— RG&E has been divesting in our community for a long time. We need the PSC’s assistance and expertise to review their performance and to consider funding a study into moving away from RG&E in the near future.”

The letter, according to the City of Rochester, cites RG&E’s “audacious” request for rate hikes amid the rising frustrations with its ongoing billing failures and shrinking investments in customer service.

At the end of February, RG&E and NYSEG announced they hired 30 new customer service reps to help with ongoing bill issues.

The city adds with cost-of-living expenses at a crisis point, especially for communities like Rochester with high rates of poverty, RG&E’s well-documented failures and skyrocketing energy bills are prompting increased demands in the Rochester community to conduct a study to municipalize RG&E.

“We are compelled by the idea of regaining local control of our public utility, as RG&E’s ownership and interests are now international,” the letter states. “Yet, we understand this is bigger than the City of Rochester since RG&E is failing in nine counties in our region. We believe that N.Y. State and the PSC should be at the center of these discussions and should ultimately fund a study to take over and improve RG&E’s operations.”

The letter points to the precedent of the State’s pivotal role in the 1980 transition of the Long Island Lighting Co. to a public utility and suggest that any fines that might result from a PSC investigation into RG&E could offset the cost of the study.

News 8 sat down with RG&E’s President and CEO Trish Nilsen on Friday. She shared her response to the city.

“I look forward to working with the mayor and his staff and team on ways that we can better serve the community,” Nilsen said. “We’ve been doing pop-up customer service activities with the community. We are training and staffing our call center, an evergreen job that is posted.”