FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Wednesday, February 21, 202
Advocates and Community Members Urge Stronger Utility Oversight by Springfield City Council
City Council approves CWLP budget and water rate hike without low-income protections and overdue energy planning analysis
SPRINGFIELD, IL -- Today, the Springfield City Council voted to approve City Water Light & Power’s (CWLP) 2025 budget despite the proposal’s lack of water rate hike protections for low-income residents and failure to include cost allocations to conduct an energy planning analysis. The CWLP budget and accompanying presentation leaves open significant questions about how Springfield will address decades of neglect to the city’s water infrastructure and how the utility intends to comply with environmental regulations for both lead pipe replacement and coal pollution requirements.
The water rate hike is projected to saddle Springfield residents with 74 percent rate increases on their monthly water bill by 2026 and fails to include any improved measures to support low-income residents with bill assistance, water efficiency rebates, or water shut-off restrictions. The proposal barely begins to address infrastructure needs that have long been neglected, nor does it account for the bloated costs of the proposed Hunter Lake. CWLP’s proposal to replace lead service lines over the next 20 years fails to identify alternative near-term strategies to comply with President Biden’s proposed lead pipe rule that requires replacements within the next ten years. The Biden Administration’s lead pipe rule, which was proposed in November 2023, addresses the disproportionate effects of lead exposure on low-income communities and communities of color.
“This rate hike will fall hardest on low-income and Black and Brown residents who have also carried the heaviest burden of lead exposure from our water system and coal pollution from the city’s power plant,” said Dr. Roxanne Casey, a Springfield homeowner and leader with the Faith Coalition for the Common Good. “As a homeowner in Springfield, I’m already paying twice the utility costs and this rate hike will be beyond unmanageable. It is already hard to find money left over to pay for food, personal items, and household goods.”
“The failure of two amendments that sought to moderate the impact of these rate hikes underscores the urgency of our appeal for a comprehensive and inclusive approach to our city’s environmental and infrastructural challenges. These rate increases place a disproportionate burden on the residents of Springfield’s East Side, many of whom are already navigating challenges due to environmental injustice and economic hardship,” said the Resistor Sisterhood in a statement.
Compliance with environmental standards has been a long-standing challenge for the City of Springfield’s utility, especially in regard to coal pollution. In response to litigation filed by Sierra Club, Prairie Rivers Network, and Springfield NAACP in 2017, the Illinois Pollution Control Board (IPCB) ruled last September that CWLP is responsible for ongoing groundwater contamination from its leaching coal ash ponds at the Dallman plant. The IPCB will next determine what steps CWLP will need to take and what civil penalties it will need to pay to address this contamination. Even more recently, after CWLP released a massive dust cloud of coal ash across the city in August 2021, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul filed a lawsuit against CWLP for multiple violations of the Illinois Environmental Protection Act, IPCB regulations, and CWLP’s Clean Air Act operating permit.
“CWLP’s budget presentation made it clear that they do not have an adequate plan to meet important state and federal environmental requirements,” said Nick Dodson, Chair of the Sangamon Valley Group of Sierra Club Illinois. “Springfield City Council needs to exercise stronger oversight of our municipal utility and require CWLP to conduct the next utility planning process to transparently assess the most cost effective options to meet those environmental requirements and our future electricity needs.”
Additionally, Springfield’s utility faces critical decisions on how to meet emissions reduction requirements under state law and tightening federal standards. Despite the mounting liability on continued coal use, CWLP is actively pursuing a carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) project at the Dallman coal plant. The CCS project was briefly referenced in the 2025 CWLP budget presentation, but the utility has offered very few details about the project publicly or the long-term liability risks of injecting and storing sequestered carbon underground indefinitely.
Following community demands for greater utility transparency in 2018, CWLP and the City Council agreed to conduct an energy planning process, a standard utility industry practice formally referred to as an integrated resource plan. The City contracted The Energy Authority (TEA) to conduct its first planning process that year to assess how the utility could provide the most cost-effective energy mix to meet Springfield’s projected energy and reliability needs. TEA’s energy planning analysis informed the retirement decisions on several of the utility’s uneconomic coal units and recommended reassessing the best economic plan for the remaining coal unit at the Dallman coal plant within 3-5 years. CWLP has not completed this recommended effort despite significant changes to the industry and billions of dollars in tax incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act and other policies aimed at making renewable generation resources even more affordable.
“There are big challenges ahead for Springfield's water infrastructure and power supply future and we can’t keep kicking the can down the road to plan accordingly,” said Anne Logue, Springfield resident and long-time board member of Sustainable Springfield. “There’s too much at stake to not put politics aside and build an equitable and sustainable plan for Springfield’s future.”