Peco and its worker union reached a tentative agreement on a new contractlate Monday, ending the first strike in the company’s history on its third day.
Roughly 1,500 unionized linemen, field workers, call center staff, and other Peco employees have been without a contract for more than three months, since their most recent five-year agreement expired on March 31. They walked off the job on the Fourth of July.
The union characterized the five-year agreement as a “historic contract victory” in an announcement late Monday, noting that it included cash balance pension plans, full retirement medical coverage, and “significant wage increases” for all members.
“We said from day one that our members’ top priorities were restoring pensions and retirement medical coverage for all members, and we won that and more,” Larry Anastasi, president of IBEW Local 614, said in a statement.
Wage increases for field workers are 4% annually for the first four years and 4.5% in the fifth year, according to the union, and call center workers are to get 3% raises annually throughout the five-year contract.
Peco announced the agreement Monday night in a company statement.
“We value our long-standing relationship with IBEW Local 614 and appreciate the efforts of both bargaining teams in reaching this agreement,” Peco’s statement said. “The proposed contract recognizes the contributions of our employees while supporting our responsibility to deliver reliable, affordable service across southeastern Pennsylvania.”
With the agreement in place, Peco and the union said, the work stoppage will end while union members vote on ratifying the contract.A union spokesperson said members would return to work Wednesday and a date to vote on the contract has not yet been decided.
Peco and the union had held daily bargaining sessions since last Wednesday to reach an agreement. Over the weekend and into Monday, workers picketed outside Peco’s headquarters in Center City.
Larry Anastasi, president and business manager of IBEW Local 614, and Stuart Davidson, general counsel for the union, speak with the media Monday amid contract negotiations and day three of the worker strike.
Meanwhile, Peco has been contending with outages following thunderstorms in recent days. The company had a contingency plan in place, which included workers from outside the region.
Over 57,000 customers were without power on the night of July Fourth at the height of the outages, Peco said, but within less than 24 hours, that number was reduced to less than 6,000. As of Monday afternoon, the company reported roughly 4,400 outages on its webpage, and the number was just over 100 a day later.
The tentative deal marks a pivotal moment in what have been challenging negotiations between the union, IBEW Local 614, and Peco. Bargaining turned ugly in April, as each side accused the other of using unfair tactics.
In addition to raises and better healthcare benefits, the union wanted its contract to include a uniform retirement plan for all members. Currently, roughly 600 of the 1,500 union workers do not have pensions, the union has said, and pension benefits vary for the other 900 or so.
Utility companies started moving away from providing pensions to new hires in the 1990s, according to William Dwyer, a professor at the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations, who once worked at PSE&G in New Jersey. That left 401(k) as the typical retirement benefit. At Peco, that happened later — the company stopped putting new hires into its pension plan in 2021, according to the union.
The tentative agreement includes a requirement that call center workers get 24-hour notice of mandatory overtime, as well as better upgrade pay for union members who complete tasks outside their typical job description, according to the union.
In Southeastern Pennsylvania, Peco provides electricity to 1.7 million customers and natural gas to 553,000.
Shareholders of Camden-based American Water Works and Bryn Mawr-based Essential Utilities, which owns the Aqua water and sewer companies, voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to merge and create a combined company with nearly $30 billion in yearly water and sewer sales.
More than 99% of the 161 million American Water shares that were voted were cast in favor of the deal, the company told the Securities & Exchange Commission. Essential’s online proposal to merge was approved by around 95% of voting shareholders.
The planned combination of these rivals, which have competed for more than 100 years to manage water and sewer for the small number of U.S. communities that allow for-profit operators, still needs approval from state public utility commissions.
The combined companies’ sales are concentrated in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In suburban Philadelphia, Aqua serves West Chester, northern Delaware County, parts of Lower Bucks, and Main Line communities. American Water serves Abington, King of Prussia, Norristown, Phoenixville, and nearby towns.
New Jersey American Water serves towns along the PATCO rail line in Camden County, in northern and central Burlington County, and in Shore communities such as Absecon and Ocean City. Aqua New Jersey has customers in the three suburban South Jersey counties and at the Shore.
American Water’s 14 million U.S. customers include systems in 12 other states, and on 18 U.S. military bases. Essential has around 3 million customers, including systems in six other states,and Pittsburgh-based Peoples Gas, which serves 750,000 in western Pennsylvania and Kentucky.
American Water is already the nation’s largest private operator of water and sewer systems, and the deal will make it a larger player in competition with Florida-based NextEra Water Group and France-based Veolia’s U.S. operations, among other private systems that have been seeking to expand.
A separate vote on an Essential executive pay package drew some opposition, with 85%approving.
That package included more than $17 million in severance compensation and stock grants for departing Essential CEO Christopher H. Franklin, plus medical benefits and up to three years’ professional assistance helping him land another job, plus millions more for his four top deputies.
The merged company’s larger size, as big as many of the leading natural-gas companies that dominate utility stock-index funds, will boost its visibility to investors, John C. Griffith, the American Water chief executive who will run the combined companies, said in announcing the deal last fall.
The companies disclosed the approvals Tuesday afternoon and said more details on the vote and their plans would come later this week.
Deal backers say the combination should enable Griffith to cut management costs, boost profits, drive up the share price, and could ease pressure to keep raising water rates.
Regulators in New Jersey and Pennsylvania are weighing the company’s latest rate increase requests. American Water’s New Jersey affiliate is asking the state Board of Public Utilities for an average 10% water and 8% sewer rate hike on Jan. 16 for 2.9 million customers, which it said would fund improvements to aging water and sewer systems. Customers would pay an average of $18 more a month.
Pennsylvania’s Public Utility Commission said last month that it would consider the company’s request to boost water and sewer rates on 2.4 million customers by an average 15%, or $20 a month.
Critics had urged Essential to seek rival buyers to drive up the share price and shareholder profits from the sale, noting that both stocks had dropped after the merger was proposed last year.
Tim Quast, founder of Colorado-based ModernIR, a consultant the companies hired to help explain the merger, said share price declines are now typical, even for merger-target companies like Essential whose shares command a premium from buyers like American Water because index-fund investors such as Vanguard and BlackRock tend not to buy more shares of merging companies until a deal is completed.
Even after long competition from U.S. and foreign utility owners, private water companies serve only about one in six Americans. In recent years, customers of public utilities serving parts of Chester, Delaware, and Bucks Counties have defeated privatization campaigns, though some towns in Pennsylvania and New Jersey have signed on. Pennsylvania also has asked private operators to take over small, troubled public systems.
Blustery winds propelled the giant blades of five turbines at the Jersey-Atlantic Wind Farmon a recent day. Set on a back bay island, they were once contested over fears of noise, aesthetics, and worries of threats to Shore birds.
But two decades later, they have emerged as a spinning landmark to Atlantic City.
The 380-foot turbines silently rotate in clear view of motorists streaming to casinos. Some visitors have even requested hotel rooms facing the structures, which are taller than the Statue of Liberty.
The embrace of the land-based wind farm contrasts sharply with the more recently divisive battle over offshore wind projects, an effort stalled by economics and the Trump administration.
Together, the Jersey-Atlantic Wind Farm turbines produce 63% of the energy for the Atlantic County Utilities Authority’s wastewater treatment plant, which serves 14 municipalities. Officials calculate the farm has saved ratepayers $8.8 million since its grand opening on Dec. 12, 2005.
It is one of only two wind farms operating in New Jersey. The other is a much smaller farm in Bayonne.
“This was a total home run for everybody involved,” said Richard Dovey, president of the ACUA at the time it was built. “It’s been nothing but successful, environmentally and economically … [an] inspiration for many other entities, whether they’re public or private.”
How the wind farm came to be
The idea for a wind farm near Atlantic City came from a worker in the energy industry who passed the idea onto Dovey in the early 2000s. With Dovey’s help, it picked up support in former Gov. Jim McGreevey’s administration.
Dovey believed in renewable energy and thought it could power the ACUA’s regional wastewater treatment plant on City Island in Absecon Bay, about two miles from the Atlantic Ocean. He thought Atlantic City’s ample breezes from land and seawould make it an ideal location.
Atlantic City’s ample breezes from land and sea made an ideal location for a wind farm.
Community Energy Inc., a developer of wind power based in the Philadelphia suburbs, played a significant role in the project’s development and received a $1.7 million grant from the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities.
The New Jersey Sierra Club backed the project.
Construction began in mid-2005. The project cost $12 million and included driving pilings into an island of upland surrounded by wetlands and installing intricate concrete bases to support the turbines made by GE.
Currently, the wind farm is owned by Texas-based Leeward Energy. Leeward rents the land for the wind farm from ACUA.
In return, ACUA has a 20-year agreement to purchase the power produced by the turbines from Leeward for 7.9 cents a kilowatt-hour, which was cheap even then. Now, the rate is about half the market rate for energy.
It has helped ACUA keep some of the lowest sewer rates in the state.
However, that agreement is expiring, and the two sides are in negotiations to renew a contract, which could change the rate the ACUA pays for its wind power.
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Community concerns
Initially, the wind farm faced resistance. Residents in the neighboring Venice Park section of Atlantic City were concerned primarily about potential noise from the turbines.
To allay their fears, Dovey organized a bus trip that took residents to visit a wind farm in Somerset County in Pennsylvania.
“Their major concern was noise,” Dovey, now 73, recalls. “We drove literally underneath the turbine. One neighborhood leader took one step out and said my air conditioner is louder than this; let’s go home. They thought the turbines were beautiful, even inspiring.”
In addition, there were apprehensions regarding how the turbines would affect birds and marine life. The wind farm is just below the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, a 48,000-acre area of coastal habitat. New Jersey Audubon agreed to monitor the impact on the bird population as part of its support for the project.
According to the ACUA, a three-year study by NJ Audubon found “a small number of bird deaths which could be attributed to collisions with turbines.” It found more fatalities were caused by raccoons, feral cats, and collisions with wires and trucks.
People were also concerned about the visual impact, fearing they might spoil scenic views, affect property taxes, and hurt tourism. However, the wind farm has since become an iconic part of the landscape.
The concerns were part of a broader debate at the time regarding the emerging push among some New Jersey leaders for offshore wind farms, which had faced a moratorium by the state.
Even though the moratorium was lifted, and Gov. Phil Murphy backed a large offshore wind program that would have powered millions of homes, the debate continued. This year, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to stop offshore wind, making any project in the near future unlikely.
However, a federal judge recently ruled that Trump exceeded his authority with the order, a ruling the administration is likely to challenge. It is unclear whether renewable energy companies still have the political will for a renewed push to build an offshore wind farm off the coast of New Jersey.
Taking advantage of wind
The Jersey-Atlantic Wind Farm is an example of how wind power can work, even if on a smaller scale. The farm is ideally located because of consistent land and ocean breezes. If winds exceed 45 mph, the turbines, each equipped with a weather station, switch off to protect the machinery. That happens only a few times a year.
Matt DeNafo, current president of the ACUA, says the wind farm has been a “huge project” for his organization. The ACUA is operating a pilot project that would store energy captured by the turbines in a battery. A solar array on site also provides about 3% of the facility’s power.
DeNafo said the arrangement with Leeward brought significant economic stability through the 20-year fixed rate. He said it allows the agency to offer the lowest wastewater rates in the region.
At the same time, the ACUA does not have to pay for maintenance of the turbines, while still collecting rent from Leeward.
If winds exceed 45 mph, the turbines, each equipped with a weather station, switch off to protect the machinery.
“It’s really been a great partnership for us. It’s been a beacon for our organization,” DeNafo said. One casino was “getting a lot of requests for windmill-view rooms because it’s got a calming effect.”
Harrah’s, MGM, and Borgata casino hotels all are in view of the windmills.
Amy Menzel, a spokesperson for the ACUA, said summer tours of the wind farm and treatment plant are popular.
“We give open house tours in the summer on Wednesdays,” Menzel said. “People can just drop in. We have a lot of curious people who are visiting the Shore. The tours are really a mix of locals and out-of-town visitors, people who just want to get a little closer and learn more.”
Editor’s note: This article has been corrected to note that the wind farm is on an upland, not a wetland.
Philadelphia discharges 12.7 billion gallons of raw, diluted sewage into the Delaware River’s watershed each year, with Camden County adding to the mix, according to a new report.
That’s a problem, say the report’s authors at the nonprofit advocacy groupPennEnvironment. Philadelphia and Camden border the river, and significant recreational potential is blocked forpart of the year because of pollution from both, the authors say.
A waterway can remain unsafe for recreation for up to 72 hours after an overflow. That suggests local waterways could be unsafe for recreation up to 195 days per year, or more than half the year.
Five decades after the Clean Water Act mandated that waterways be made safe for swimming and fishing, combined sewer overflows (CSOs) continue to pollute during wet weather when untreated sewage and runoff surge into nearby creeks and rivers, creating the potential to sicken recreational users.
David Masur, executive director of PennEnvironment, said the group included Camden County in its most recent report“to get a more holistic view.”PennEnvironment’s first report on CSOs in 2023focused only on Philly.
The pollution “affects the waterway, the environment, and public health,” Masur said. “The river is the border between the two states, and people on both sides use it a lot.”
PennEnvironment acknowledges that both Philly and Camden County have programs to reduce overflows and is calling on federal officials for increased funding to put proper infrastructure into place.
Philadelphia Council member Jamie Gauthier (center) spoke Monday about PennEnvironment’s report on pollution from combined sewer overflows. To her left is Margaret Meigs, president, Friends of the Schuylkill Navy. And to her right is Tim Dillingham, senior adviser, American Littoral Society, and Hanna Felber, clean water associate at PennEnvironment Research & Policy Center.
Frequent overflows, high volume in Philly
Roughly 60% of Philadelphia is served by a combined sewer system, which has 164 outfalls — really large metal or concrete openings — that discharge pollution into waterways. A CSO system uses a single pipe to collect and transport sewage from homes and businessesas well as stormwater runoff from streets and sidewalks.
During dry weather, the system can handle the volume before safely releasing it back into the rivers. But during heavy rainfall, thesystem discharges untreated, though highly diluted, sewage mixed with stormwater directly into waterways.
Despite the Philadelphia Water Department’s ongoing Green City, Clean Waters project — a 25-year plan focusing on green infrastructure to reduce overflows — the frequency and volume remain alarmingly high, the report states.
Overall, CSOs dumped an average of 12.7 billion gallons of raw sewage mixed with polluted stormwater per year into local waterways from 2016 to 2024, the authors of the report stated. They included an online map to show the location of the outfalls and annual overflow.
Half the sewage came from just 10 CSOs.
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Still, the numbers are a slight improvement over the 15 billion gallons a year released into local rivers, as PennEnvironment reported in 2023.
Philadelphia gets its drinking water from the rivers, but the CSOs are downstream of the city’s treatment plants on the Delaware and the Schuylkill.
The reportused publicly available data to show that five of six waterways in Philly produced at least one overflow 65 times or more per year on average between 2016 and 2024. Those were the Delaware River, the Schuylkill, and Cobbs, Frankford and Tacony Creeks.
In better news: The average volume of overflow per inch of precipitation declined by about 16% from previous periods, but progress is slow and threatened by increased rainfall and rising sea levels due to climate change, the authors say.
PWD could not be reached for comment.
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Camden County
The report also found persistent overflows in Camden County. The cities of Camden and Gloucester, along with the Camden County Municipal Utilities Authority (CCMUA), operate combined sewer systems that frequently overflow into the Delaware River and its tributaries, including the Cooper River and Newton Creek.
The report found that systemson the Camden County side of the river overflowed into local waterways an averageof 76 days per year from 2016 to 2024.
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The highest-frequency outfall for the Cooper River released sewage for an average of 118 days annually during that period.
The Delaware River received sewage overflows for an average of 94 days annually from its highest-frequency outfall.
The authors said gaps in data leave them unable to show the total volume of diluted sewage releasedfrom Camden. But they said that the amount of “solids/floatables” collected at each outfall is an indicator a waterway is polluted.
Dan Keashen, a spokesperson for Camden County, said officials have been making strides.
He said that crews recently cleaned 30 miles of pipe and that a $26 million project is underway to physically separate the combined sewer service area of Pennsauken that flows into Camden. Officials are also studying how to better achieve compliance for the largest outfall in the system, a project estimated to cost $40 million to $150 million when complete.
What can be done?
The report concludes that current plans by Philadelphia and Camden County are insufficient to achieve the goal of a clean Delaware River watershed.
The report was written by John Rumpler, clean water director for Environment America, PennEnvironment’s parent organization, and Elizabeth Ridlington, associate director of the Frontier Group, a nonprofit research group that is part of the Public Interest Network, an environmental advocacy organization.
The authors call for officials to accelerate action to end all sewer overflows, set a hard deadline, and find new ways to pay for necessary infrastructure upgrades.
Philadelphia CouncilmemberJamie Gauthier, chair of the committee on the environment, called overflows “a public health crisis” and urged PWD’s new commissioner, Benjamin Jewell, to act. She said elected officials in Harrisburg and Washington also need to step up.
PWD is separately under pressure by a new Environmental Protection Agency regulation that seeks to improve the amount of dissolved oxygen in the Delaware by ordering a large-scale reduction of ammonia at the city’s three water pollution control plants. PWD estimates that the price for compliance is $3.6 billion and would cost households an additional $265 annually on their water bills.
The authors of the PennEnvironment report concede the CSO task is daunting. But they say Portland and Boston faced similar situations, invested in infrastructure, and managed to make CSO overflows infrequent. Washington, D.C., they said, is on track to reduce sewage overflows by 96% in 2030.
Hanna Felber, a PennEnvironment advocate, said that PWD needs to use creative funding, such as floating longer-term bonds to finance projects, and that its engineers need to find more creative solutions, such as installing larger stormwater tunnels that flow separately from sewage.
“Unfortunately, our new report on sewage pollution in Philadelphia shows that on far too many days each year, the Philadelphia Water Department’s pipes and sewer systems dump huge volumes of raw sewage into our beautiful waters, harming our environment and depriving the public of a safe place to fish, boat, and float,” Felber said.
A few years ago, he was driving with his then-11-year-old daughter when she asked where roads came from.
“The government,” Gibbons responded.
“What’s the government?” his daughter asked.
That led to a longer explanation and eventual father-daughter trip to a Gloucester Township meeting so she could see the government in, ah, action. Having covered many local government meetings and school boards long ago, I can attest that Gibbons went beyond any parental or civic duty.
Gibbons continued to attend the meetings when a proposal to dissolve the Municipal Utilities Authority (MUA) caught his attention. He feared the township was planning to sell the water and sewer system.
But during sworn oral testimony in a May 2023 teleconference, an attorney representing the township said there was no expectation the utilities would be sold within the next five years. Mayor David Mayer agreed.
Yet, a year later, the township council voted to sell the sewer system to the highest bidder.
“They lied to us,” Gibbons said.
The township received two bids from large for-profit water companies: Aqua offered $52 million, and New Jersey American Water bid a whopping $143 million, plus a promise to make an additional $90 million in capital improvements to a system that only needed an estimated $25 million in repairs.
Something didn’t smell right. Even for a sewer system.
Keith Gibbons (middle) joined Ira Eckstein and Denise Coyne at a rally opposing a plan to sell a South Jersey sewer and water utility in October 2024.
Coincidentally, Mayor Mayer worked for American Water. In addition to his job as director of government affairs at the water company, his mayoral salary is $52,000.
To guard against any conflict of interest, Mayer recused himself from any discussion regarding the sewer sale.
Even still, American Water’s lucrative offer raised eyebrows. But generous bids are part of the for-profit playbook. Aqua offered Bucks County $1.1 billion for its sewer system, but the commissioners backed away after fierce public opposition.
For-profit water companies have been throwing big money at small towns in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and beyond in an effort to scale up. The utility systems may not seem sexy, but they are mini monopolies that generate steady cash flow.
In Pennsylvania, a 2016 change in the law essentially opened the door for local utilities to be sold at higher prices. Local politicians are often happy to get the utility systems off the books and use the windfall to fund other projects or avoid tax increases.
But often left out of the negotiations are the ratepayers.
After the sales go through, the for-profit companies often jack up the rates. In some towns, after a brief rate freeze, the water bills have increased by 100%.
Rates have also increased at government-owned utility companies, but not by nearly as much. For example, Philadelphia recently increased water rates by 9%.
As utility bills grow, residents have nowhere to turn. Aging infrastructure, climate change, and increased demand, including to cool computer data centers, are expected to further drive up water prices in the years to come.
From left: Denise Coyne, Nancy Kelly Gentile, Gloucester Township independent mayoral candidate Keith Gibbons, and Ira Eckstein canvass supporters in Clementon, N.J., in September.
For-profit companies say they offer professional management and resources to make long-deferred upgrades, as well as the ability to purchase materials in bulk and spread the risk across systems as they grow.
Mayer said in an interview that the sewer sale would have enabled Gloucester to reduce property taxes, eliminate its debt, and make other improvements.
But critics argue that handing control to for-profit companies seeking quick returns on investments is shortsighted and results in higher costs to consumers. After all, water and sewer utilities are supposed to be a long-term public good, not a profit center.
To its credit, Gloucester Township scheduled a referendum last November to let residents vote on whether to sell the sewer system or not. A public vote should be a requirement, but most towns avoid referendums because the last thing they want is for taxpayers to have a say in the utility system they own.
The referendum gave Gibbons time to mount a grassroots campaign against the sale. He knocked on doors, handed out yard signs, and used a podcast to raise awareness.
But Gibbons seemed overmatched. His group spent roughly $3,000 opposing the sale, while New Jersey American Water spent about $1 million.
Yet, David beat Goliath in a landslide. More than 80% voted against the sale.
Gibbons, 48, a Cinnaminson High grad, who ran a Christmas tree farm and worked for Live Nation but is now self-employed and serves on the school board, became somewhat of a local hero in a town of 66,000 residents.
Gloucester Township independent mayoral candidate Keith Gibbons holds promotional materials encouraging constituents to vote for him.
Residents soon urged him to run for mayor.
Gibbons, a former Republican, is running as an independent against Mayer, who has spent his life in South Jersey politics, working for former U.S. Rep. Rob Andrews in the 1990s before becoming chief of staff in the Camden County Clerk’s Office.
He also served as a New Jersey assemblyman before getting elected mayor in 2010. Mayer’s wife is a Camden County freeholder.
Mayer is part of the Democratic machine that has controlled South Jersey for decades, but has recently shown signs of losing its grip on power. In Gloucester Township, there are still twice as many registered Democrats as Republicans.
The election has turned nasty. There are allegations that the Democrats tried to recruit a “phantom candidate” to run as a Republican to siphon votes away from Gibbons.
Mayer said Gibbons has been on the school board for three years, and “I don’t know what he’s touting as his accomplishments.”
Other attempts to muddy Gibbons indicate that the Democratic establishment may be nervous.
Is it because Gibbons has a sophisticated field operation?
“I don’t even have a campaign manager,” he said.
Does Gibbons have deep-pocketed donors?
“I’ve spent about $5,000 on the election,” he said.
What’s his campaign message?
“I’m not a political person,” Gibbons said. “I just want to fix local problems.”
Can an outsider with no political experience win?
Gibbons believes voters are fed up with South Jersey’s entrenched political machine, in which jobs and contracts often go to cronies. He argues no one is looking out for taxpayers who are often too busy to get involved, or believe they can’t do anything to change the system.
But his efforts to block the sewer sale show that one person — and a motivated electorate — can make a difference.
Mayer counters that he is proud to be a Democrat, and that the party’s strength has benefited South Jersey. He pointed to a list of accomplishments as mayor, from creating community policing to adding open space, attracting new businesses, and opening an office for veterans, adding that no party boss tells him what to do.
For his part, Gibbons said he supports term limits and smart development. He plans to focus on fiscal responsibility and government transparency. If elected, he promised the water and sewer system would not get sold to a for-profit company whose main mission is to maximize shareholder value.
“I don’t claim to know everything, but I do know enough,” Gibbons said.
Now there’s a campaign slogan for an accidental candidate.
