Electric Utility Ramps Up Local Government Advocacy to Protect Operations from Risk & Spot Opportunities

Challenge

Minor changes to local government ordinances were having outsized consequences for the public affairs team of an electric utility tasked with the responsibility of monitoring the discussions of hundreds of municipalities across its service areas to find operational threats, mitigate risk, and spot opportunities.

Solution

Relief was found in Curate, an AI-powered local government monitoring tool. Curate combined the power of machine learning with the most comprehensive and up-to-date database of local government documents in the country to keep the team ahead of local issues.

Results

The public affairs team is now much more confident they are staying abreast of local policy changes that could affect the utility. They also spend less time tracking down and reviewing documents, that they can now take a more proactive approach to local government advocacy.

About

Minor changes to local government ordinances can often have outsized consequences for electric utilities, who must work closely with municipalities to maintain their infrastructure and prevent disruptions of their services to customers.

For one privately-owned utility company, this difficult job is taken on by the public affairs teams. This team is tasked with the responsibility of monitoring the discussions of hundreds of municipalities across its service areas to find anything that could threaten its operations, and then mitigating the impact with hyper-local government engagement and advocacy campaigns.

For this large investor-owned electric utility, two issues, in particular, represent serious, ongoing threats:

• a growing trend of small municipalities increasing their street opening fees, and
• a shift in public perception of natural gas as an environmentally friendly fuel

In order to protect the company’s access to streets for utility repairs and fighting natural gas bans require constant vigilance by the team.

Missed Opportunities Represent Tremendous Financial Risk

The local advocacy efforts of the public affairs team have a significant impact on the company’s operational costs, especially when it comes to repairing and replacing underground delivery infrastructure.

Since utility maintenance crews frequently need to work underneath streets to repair and replace underground delivery infrastructure, street opening permit fees can become a significant expense.

One of the ongoing risks is that municipalities have been known to pass major fee increases with only the minimum required public notice.

In one particularly damaging instance, a municipality voted to increase street cutting fees by 1,500 times. The team member responsible for covering that community missed the proposal when it appeared on an agenda, and the issue led to a major lawsuit between the municipality and the utility.

In regards to cost-savings opportunities, whenever possible, the utility seeks to collaborate with municipalities to perform planned maintenance at the same time as a street is already being torn up for other reasons. This can save the utility from shouldering the cost of the street opening permit.

But it’s also the responsibility of the public affairs team to find out about these opportunities by monitoring discussions at traffic planning meetings and maintaining good relationships with local traffic engineers.

The public affairs team also has to watch out for street excavation moratoria, which municipalities often pass after a repaving or reconstruction project finishes and can make it difficult and/or even more expensive to perform maintenance on those streets until the moratorium expires.

Shifting Attitudes About Natural Gas Threaten Utilities

The other major operational challenge for this public affairs team is the monitoring and management of the public’s perception of natural gas against the backdrop of growing awareness of climate change.

In an attempt to achieve carbon neutrality goals, many municipalities are considering banning natural gas hookups in new residential and/or commercial developments.

These bans pose an obvious threat to utilities that provide natural gas from a revenue perspective, but they also threaten the energy grid as a whole, the public affairs team notes. The team says the bans reflect a faulty understanding among the public of the current renewable energy landscape. Current technology can’t support a fully electric energy grid—natural gas still serves a crucial purpose, enabling the use of solar and wind energy when they are available, but serving as a reliable backup when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.

The public affairs team is constantly monitoring municipal discussions for mentions of natural gas, as well as climate action plans. The organization seizes these opportunities to proactively educate elected officials about the importance of natural gas as they develop plans for the next decade.

The Search for a Scalable, Timely Local Government Monitoring Solution

Historically, the options for public affairs managers to keep track of local policies was limited and often inefficient.

This team would register to receive copies of meeting agendas from municipal clerks—either by mail or e-mail—but sorting through every agenda of every town in their service area was monotonous, time-consuming and prone to missing items based on manual review.

The public affairs team also went the route of third-party consultancies, which offered agenda-monitoring services. But their fees were often too high to provide coverage for an entire scope of operations. And since those consultants relied on staff members to manually read each agenda and flag issues as they found them, they were prone to the same rate of human error as the public affairs team themselves.

The results were often too slow and unreliable for this electric utilities company. They missed some issues completely, and others they only found out about after they had already come to a vote.

Municipal Monitoring Tool Empowers Effective Local Government Engagement

With such high consequences for missing a single item, the public affairs team faced tremendous personal and professional pressure to stay informed about every policy discussion happening in their territory.

Their relief was found in Curate, an AI-powered local government monitoring tool. Curate combines the power of machine learning with the most comprehensive and up-to-date database of local government documents in the country.

The Result

The public affairs team now receives customized, timely alerts whenever any of their topics of concern appear on a municipal agenda or minutes in their territory.

Each team member can filter the report to see only the locations that fall within their coverage area and review all mentions of a particular topic within a given date range. This allows them to keep tabs on the highest priority issues even when they don’t have time to read the entire report.

The public affairs team is now much more confident that they are staying abreast of local policy changes that could affect the utility.

As they are spending less time tracking down documents and reviewing documents that don’t mention their topics, they can now take a more proactive approach to local government advocacy.

They’re able to identify trends across their service areas and begin education campaigns long before a particular policy is on the table for a vote.

About Curate

Curate, a FiscalNote company, is a civic intelligence company that empowers organizations to monitor risk and find opportunities in local government discussions at scale. Government relations professionals use Curate’s database and custom reports to track policies, projects, and hot topics in more than 12,000 municipalities across the U.S. Curate is leveraging artificial intelligence to change the way organizations engage with local government.