This spring, your voice made a difference. Thanks to the strong response from electric cooperative members across Illinois, Senate Bill 40 did not advance during the spring legislative session in Springfield.
I want to personally thank each of you who reached out to your legislators through Voices for Cooperative Power to oppose this bill. Your advocacy protected your cooperative’s ability to keep rates affordable and continue planning responsibly for our energy future. The unnecessary planning mandates would have undercut your board’s ability to make decisions that reflect local needs.
This proposal would have required electric cooperatives like yours to conduct complex and costly integrated resource plans — plans that are more appropriate for large investor-owned utilities, not not-for-profit co-ops governed by the members they serve. These requirements would have meant more red tape, higher costs and less flexibility for local leaders like your board of directors to make the right decisions for your community.
Electric cooperatives already engage in thoughtful, long-term planning to ensure safe, affordable and reliable power. We don’t need a one-size-fits-all mandate from Springfield to tell us how to do what we’ve done successfully for decades. Their language threatened to take that control away from you — the consumer-members.
The substance of the legislation was introduced as SB 40 on May 28. At one point, the bill was 865 pages long, but most important to us were the 45 pages of the bill that were aimed just at electric cooperatives and municipalities.
While this large and very expensive bill did not pass by the end of the spring legislative session, this issue isn’t over. It’s likely we’ll see this proposal again in the near future. But, because of your engagement, lawmakers now know that Illinois electric cooperative members are paying attention — and that we will speak up when legislation would increase electric rates.
Thank you for standing with us and making your voice heard. Your involvement and advocacy are what keep electric co-ops strong, local and focused on what matters most: serving you.
To stay up to date and to make your voice heard, join Voices for Cooperative Power, a network of Americans dedicated to transforming rural and suburban communities that educate policymakers on the localized, community-based approach that electric co-ops take to keep the lights on. Go to aiec.coop/iclvcp to sign up.
