Boulder requests more time for municipal negotiations

BOULDER —  The city of Boulder filed a report with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission on Wednesday afternoon on the status of its negotiations with Xcel Energy and requested for more time to reach an agreement on issues regarding the city’s efforts to create a local electric utility.

In September, the PUC gave the city permission to move onto next steps in its process to create a municipal utility but required three conditions be met: to reach an agreement with Xcel that provide it with property rights necessary to serve its customers after the city begins operating its utility; provide a revised list of assets outside substations that includes any property the city will seek to acquire and provide a revised list of poles; reach an agreement with Xcel regarding how the city will pay Xcel for the work to construct new facilities or reconfigure existing ones it will continue to own.

The deadline the PUC set was Wednesday. In its filing, which the city said Xcel supports, it requested a 90-day extension.

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“Both the city and Xcel have worked diligently to reach an agreement with regard to the topics requested by the PUC and the city is encouraged by the progress made thus far,” City Attorney Tom Carr said in a prepared statement. “Because the issues before the parties are complex and both parties are committed to getting it right, we have submitted a request for additional time to submit the agreements to the PUC, a motion that Xcel supports. The process to reach these agreements is just one of several actions the city is pursuing, with final voter approval of the acquisition and construction of the municipal electric utility assets projected to occur in 2020.”