HOLYOKE — More than a year after he was first appointed, Marcos Marrero was confirmed Tuesday as a commissioner on the Holyoke Gas & Electric board.
In a voice vote, the City Council confirmed Mayor Joshua Garcia’s appointment of Marrero to a six-year term on the three-member board of the municipally owned utility. Marrero previously worked for around a decade as the director of the city’s Office of Planning & Economic Development before becoming executive vice president for community development at the Massachusetts Development Finance Agency.
Former mayor Alex Morse had previously appointed Marrero in January 2021, but a group of city councilors voted to send his appointment not to the committee that usually deals with those appointments, Public Service, but to the Development and Government Relations Committee, which for a year did not give him a hearing.
After he was sworn in this January, Garcia again appointed Marrero to the position and the City Council this time sent the appointment to the Public Service Committee, which held a hearing on March 9.
During the nearly two-hour hearing, some councilors grilled Marrero about his views on a moratorium that HG&E has had to place on new gas hookups amid a lack of gas capacity in the region; how gas fits into the utility’s portfolio going forward; the electrification of some parts of the city; local resistance to building more fossil fuel infrastructure and more.
In particular, At-large Councilor Kevin Jourdain asked a series of questions, spending around an hour asking for Marrero’s thoughts on parts of the utility’s operations. Several questions from Jourdain and others were focused on what Marrero would do to end the gas moratorium and whether his policy ideas would hurt average people financially.
Marrero, who has past experience working on government energy policy in Puerto Rico and New York, noted that the moratorium is because of a resource constraint: The pipeline that currently provides gas to the region is at maximum capacity, meaning that utilities like HG&E and others in the region have to limit new hookups to make sure they have enough gas for days of peak consumption during the winter.
Marrero said to solve that issue, HG&E will have to “look at all the options we have on the table,” including potentially adding some more gas capacity. A central task will be increasing efficiency across the city, he said, and working where the utility can to electrify the grid. HG&E should also work to incentivize those who heat their homes with oil from other companies to move to electric, for example, and become HG&E customers, he added.
“Most of the conversation tonight has revolved around this issue, and I don’t know how I can be more clear: I am not anti-gas,” Marrero said later in the meeting when again asked about the moratorium. “I’m a planner and there are multiple difficulties in getting over a capacity constraint. That’s what we have. I understand that people want to turn on the gas, literally tomorrow. We do not have the capacity … to do that.”
Jourdain also questioned why Garcia or Morse didn’t reappoint current Commissioner Robert Griffin, whose term expired at the end of June 2020 but who has continued his service as Marrero’s appointment sat in committee.
“What is it that you bring to the table that Bob Griffin isn’t bringing to the table?” Jourdain asked.
The hearing featured a yelling match between Jourdain and Ward 6 Councilor Juan Anderson-Burgos, who likened Jourdain’s treatment of Marrero to a “trial.”
“We have a Latino in front of us to represent so that there’s a cultural balance in our city,” Anderson-Burgos said. “I don’t think, to certain people, we will ever be good enough. No matter how smart we are, no matter what we bring to our table … the color of our skin and how we think politically will ever be good enough.”
At-large Councilor Joseph McGiverin focused his comments on the utility’s properties, stressing that HG&E was created by Holyoke’s lawmakers and that its elected officials should have to approve the sale of any of its assets.
Eventually, the committee forwarded Marrero’s appointment to the full City Council, which on Tuesday confirmed Marrero. At-large Councilor Jose Maldonado Velez was the last to speak on Marrero’s appointment. He said that the previous City Council had buried the appointment, urging the current City Council to stop “playing these little games,” to put orders in the appropriate committee and have discussion about them.
Marrero’s term runs until 2026.