I’ve recently received three glossy, full-sheet mailings from “Maine Affordable Energy,” and you probably did too. They’re meant to scare us about the upcoming vote to create a consumer-owned utility, Pine Tree Power, which would be answerable only to its customers, not to investors and foreign owners. This might give you a clue about who paid for these mailings. If you check with the Maine Ethics Commission, you’ll find that “Maine Affordable Energy” is listed as a Ballot Question Committee, and its funding comes from Avangrid, the company that owns CMP — so, not exactly a local grass-roots group.

Avangrid itself is owned by Iberdrola, a multi-national company headquartered in Spain, which (according to its website) is committed to “defending the corporate interests of its 600,000 shareholders” — rather than the interests of its CMP customers in Maine.

They’re blatantly lying when they claim that the cost of buying out CMP and Versant will raise our taxes. Pine Tree Power wouldn’t have access to the state’s tax money; it would finance itself by borrowing money against its future revenues.

So remember: “Affordable Maine Energy” doesn’t care if our energy is affordable: it just wants to keep making money off us, its cash cow.

Claire Prontnicki

Waterville