Questionable ESCO's To Be Forced On Residents

We recently wrote about our trying to learn about Sustainable Westchester, the energy company (ESCO) all Greenburgh residents will be forced to be made a member if Mr Feiner has his way. We're also interested in its sister company, Solarize Westchester, for similar reasons. Both seem to be “blessed”, authorized, and financed by New York State, with ties to the bloated thread of New York State's labyrinth of bureaucracy. By the way, both of these companies are not-for-profits. Being a not-for-profit does not guarantee the residents and/or major taxpayers of the Town any kind of quality performance or financial savings. What is promised is our knowledge that the past performance of our Supervisor provides an almost iron-clad guarantee of future results through his oft-times illegitimate if not downright illegal, behavior. But what of NYSERDA, Sustainable Westchester and Solarize Westchester?

We went to the NYSERDA website to find out about this program. Their home page provides a small bit of information, one piece being "The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, known as NYSERDA, which states they "promote energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy sources." It says a few other things that have a politically correct “ring” to it. Please don’t misunderstand, we endorse energy saving efforts, renewable energy solutions and others that may be in development. But, we also realize the need, dependency, efficiency, cost and viability of carbon based technologies as well. We admit that being aware and respectful of our environmental impact must start individually. That’s part of the problem here in Greenburgh. The individuals are not being allowed to make their own decisions and are being spoken for by Mr Feiner and his Town Board.

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When we clicked on the Sustainable Westchester home page, we got the picture on the left (Image 1). When we tried to delve further with many of the links, we got an error page similar to the one below it (Image 2). Do they have something to hide? Then we tried the Solarize Westchester site. We again found minimal information with more snippets of generic information. What we also found was that the Board of Directors information is conspicuously missing.

Mr Feiner has taken it upon himself to compromise your extremely valuable personal information by not only entertaining Sustainable Westchester’s request to the Public Service Commission, by telling taxpayers that we are being signed up for this - whether you want it or not. It will happen as soon as the Town Board passes the resolution adopting this convoluted proposal. The petition from Sustainable Westchester starts out in the introductory statement, saying amongst other things, “...its implementation of a demonstration of community choice aggregation...for an order requiring Consolidated Edison, Inc., of New York and New York State Electric and Gas Corporation...to provide certain of the Utility's customer information to...to Petition.”* 

The lack of information about moving ahead (or not) with the Town’s participation of Sustainable Westchester’s ESCO is moving frighteningly too fast for many residents who continue to come up short for answers. Rather than feel that Mr Feiner is trying to hoodwink them, it would behoove this unchallenged administration to take a step back and gather as much information and conclusive evidence as possible before acting on joining residents into the ESCO. They should also withdrawl the proposal until such time that any and all answers are supplied, mailings are agreed to be performed and paid for by Sustainable Westchester, residents will have the opportunity to opt IN and not opt OUT. Finally, there should be a guarantee of savings that will be refunded if prices rise. If this “deal” is as good as Mr Feiner claims, he should have no problem with any of these points and moving forward at a slower pace – and canceling it if it does not offer the guaranteed savings being purported. Otherwise, they should simply scrap the entire thing. Only then will we see A Better Greenburgh.

* We skipped information in parenthesis on their web site by providing “...”.