Con Ed

Why Are We Still Paying Con Ed?

By Michael Horowitz

BRONX, NEW YORK, APRIL 25- Management officials now have a new story for the community’s merchants.

Can you believe that officials in the Riverbay Corporation’s Finance Department are now blaming Con Edison for the massive electricity-rate hikes that they have been asked to pay in recent months?

That’s pretty startling when you consider the fact that management officials, for years, had told the local community that Co-op City’s cogeneration plant would save the Riverbay Corporation more than $20 million per year be enabling the community to generate electricity without Con Edison.

That narrative changed, early last year, when Riverbay board member Daryl Johnson, an anti-management watchdog on the board who is seeking reelection to a three-year term, revealed that Co-op City had, in fact, paid Con Edison $17 million over the previous two years.

Con Edison, Johnson learned, at the time, was being paid millions of dollars per year to provide backup electricity in the event of a blackout at the cogeneration plant.

“It’s really absurd, under the circumstances, that Co-op City’s Finance Department has the audacity to blame Con Edison for the whopping increases in our electricity rates that were put into effect early this year,” one merchant said. “I’m sitting here wondering what kind of excuses the management of Co-op City is going to come up with the next time that they implement an increase in our charges.

In recent years, Co-op City’s Finance Department has come under attack from the community’s merchants for whopping increases in charges and sloppy bookkeeping.

Last year, the merchants faced whopping increases in charges for commercial real-estate taxes, largely because Co-op City’s Finance Department, for years, had failed to bill merchants for the taxes.

Lou Salegna, the Riverbay Corporation’s comptroller, said, at the time, that merchants hadn’t been billed for the taxes because Co-op City’s computer programs hadn’t included a line for these charges.

To this day, management fails to include the kinds of cost breakdowns for tax and electricity charges that are common in the real-estate industry, an informed source told City News this week.