HOLYOKE — Mayor Joshua Garcia has named Marcos Marrero, the former director of the city’s Office of Planning & Economic Development, to serve as a Holyoke Gas & Electric commissioner.
Former mayor Alex Morse had appointed Marrero, who now works at the Massachusetts Development Finance Agency, to the municipally owned utility’s board more than a year ago. But when his appointment came before the City Council on Jan. 5, 2021, seven city councilors voted to send the appointment not to the committee that usually deals with those appointments, Public Service, but to the Development and Government Relations Committee.
Since then, the DGR Committee has not acted on the appointment. Marrero was not given an interview about his qualifications, and current Commissioner Robert Griffin continued to serve on the three-member board, though his term expired at the end of June 2020. Members of the board serve for six-year terms.
Last week, the City Council took up Garcia’s Jan. 14 appointment of Marrero and referred it to the Public Service Committee, where a hearing has been scheduled for March 9. The Council also voted to take Marrero’s previous appointment out of the DGR Committee and send it to Public Service.
“This has been in my jacket for DGR for over a year,” current DGR Committee chair, At-Large Councilor Tessa R. Murphy-Romboletti, said during the meeting, referring to the place where council items go when they’re awaiting action. “I’m wondering why that happened that way … I just was curious as to why it was referred to DGR in the first place.”
Reached by telephone Monday, Marrero said that he is looking forward to serving on the board if the City Council confirms him. When asked about the year-long wait for an interview before the Council, Marrero seemed unfazed by the delay.
“The Council has its own processes and I figure whenever they want to have a confirmation hearing, they’ll call me,” he said. “Every legislature has to figure out its own priorities and I’m sure they’re busy with all kinds of things.”
Previous DGR Committee chairman David Bartley, the Ward 3 councilor, said in a phone interview Monday that the committee met every month in 2021 — sometimes twice in a month — with full agendas.
“It’s just a very busy committee,” Bartley said. “I wasn’t getting pressure on me from the G&E manager, because he’s got a full commission as it is … I really didn’t have any pressure on me to take it up. It was in the jacket, I knew it was there.”
Bartley stressed that HG&E’s board was still operating with full membership and that its operations weren’t impacted by the lack of action on Marrero’s appointment. HG&E Superintendent James Lavelle confirmed Monday that “it’s been smooth sailing” for the board of commissioners this past year.
At-large Councilor Peter Tallman was also a member of the DGR Committee last year and said that he had tried on multiple occasions to get Bartley to bring the appointment out of committee as its chair.
“We were busy but we could have taken that appointment up,” said Tallman, who had voted to send the appointment to the Public Service Committee in the first place. When asked why he thought the appointment was never brought up in the DGR Committee, he said: “I think he didn’t want that to go forward, the chairman.”
HG&E was a topic often debated on the campaign trail this fall as mayoral hopefuls addressed how they planned to address a moratorium that HG&E has had to place on new gas hookups amid a lack of gas capacity in the region.
The lack of capacity can only be rectified by expanding a pipeline. The “Northampton Lateral” pipeline that currently provides gas to the region from the Tennessee Gas pipeline is at maximum capacity, meaning that utilities like HG&E and others in the region have to limit new hookups in order to make sure they have enough gas for days of peak consumption during the winter. Those denied hookups have often had to turn to propane gas, another fossil fuel contributing to climate change.
Columbia Gas of Massachusetts had worked out an agreement several years ago with HG&E to build a new connecting pipeline to more directly serve Holyoke and communities beyond also facing a moratorium, like Northampton and Easthampton. After Columbia Gas lines exploded in the Merrimack Valley in 2018, killing one and causing tens of thousands to evacuate their homes, the company pleaded guilty to a federal felony and was forced to sell off its assets and move out of the state.
Morse, who left office in March 2021 to become Provincetown’s town manager, issued a statement on Earth Day 2019 saying that while HG&E had contractual obligations to support the project going forward, he would use his position to oppose the deal because of the ramifications that increased fossil-fuel burning would have on the planet’s climate crisis. That statement drew the ire of some city councilors, including Bartley.
Marrero, who has previously worked on government energy policy in Puerto Rico and New York, served for more than eight years as director of planning and economic development in the Morse administration.
City Councilors are sure to dig into Marrero’s thoughts on many topics, including how to deal with the lack of capacity, which has impacted local businesses and raised concerns that companies are passing up on the chance to locate in Holyoke because a gas moratorium is in place. Asked about the moratorium issue, Marrero said he’s sure that HG&E is already making plenty of efforts to address the problem, and that any commissioner would have to do their due diligence to understand those efforts.
“These things are complex and it’s not like you just pull a lever or make a contract and you’re done,” he said.
Marrero said that as technology makes it easier to electrify the grid and heating, HG&E can work to move homes off of dirtier energy sources and onto electricity, which has more stable prices for customers. He said that energy efficiency is also an essential part of easing capacity demands by lowering gas use in the city — something HG&E has committed to. As somebody who spent nearly a decade on economic issues in the city, he said he’s excited for the opportunity to lend his experience to the HG&E board.
“How do you meet those economic, environmental and societal needs?” he asked. “That’s something I’m looking forward to adding from my perspective.”
Tallman has confirmed that a confirmation hearing is scheduled March 9 for Marrero in the Public Service Committee — a three-member body chaired by Tallman. Bartley and Ward 2 Councilor Will Puello are the committee’s other two members. Tallman said he’s sure many councilors will have questions for Marrero about the moratorium and other issues.
“We’ll take it up and we want to have a good discussion,” Tallman said.
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.