Bob Yates, a city councilman there from 2015 until 2023, said Xcel and state utility regulators resisted the effort. Boulder spent $30 million on attorneys, accountants, engineering plans and the Colorado regulatory process, Yates said.
He said Xcel said it would cost much more for Boulder to buy their infrastructure than the city anticipated. Boulder also would have had to pay for operating a new utility, which includes employees, service trucks and a network operations center.
“The longer it went on, the more people realized that while it might be nice to go greener faster, it was just going to be tremendously expensive,” Yates said.
Slayton Council Member Blake Heronimus points out an old post that was marked as built in 1951 that the city had been waiting for a month to have electrical hooked up to add power to the building for the county cattlemen's association at the county fairgrounds in Slayton. (Renée Jones Schneider/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
Malchow said they will drop the fight if replacing Xcel means higher property taxes or electric bills.