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By: Helen Cherlovsky- Jewish Voice News
One of the least jubilant corners of New York City during the surreal scene of President Donald Trump and Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani smiling together at the White House last Friday was, by all accounts, the Consolidated Edison Building in Manhattan. There, behind closed doors and far from the cameras documenting the shocking détente between two men otherwise politically allergic to each other, sat the utility executives who suddenly discovered that they had become the great unifier of American politics—reviled by both a conservative president and a self-described socialist mayor-elect. And as Gothamist.com reported on Thursday, the antagonism is neither spontaneous nor unfounded.
Standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a surreal tableau that confounded longtime observers of both men, Trump declared that “fuel prices [have been] way down, but it hasn’t shown up in Con Edison.” The columnist class blinked, wondering whether they had slipped into an alternative universe. Then came Mamdani’s response—swift, clipped, and shockingly aligned with the Republican president. “Absolutely,” he said, punctuating what seemed to be the one point of agreement between two men whose visions for America could not be further apart. And with those two words, the city’s 200-year-old energy supplier suddenly found itself encircled by the most unlikely of political adversaries.
Yet the irony, as Gothamist.com highlighted in a series of meticulous analyses, is that the White House confrontation arrived too late to alter the near-term trajectory of energy rates for New Yorkers. Because just hours before the two men met, Con Edison had already secured state approval to significantly increase rates beginning in 2026—locking in a future of higher bills regardless of presidential theatrics or mayoral pressure.
CON EDISON’S HISTORY OF MANHOLE EXPLOSIONS – https://tjvnews.com/local/new-
The newly approved rate agreement, negotiated between Con Ed and the Public Service Commission, ensures that electricity rates will rise by 3.5 percent in 2026, followed by increases of 3.2 percent in 2027 and 3.1 percent in 2028. For the average New York City household, the 2026 increase alone will result in an additional four dollars per month. Gas rates will rise even more sharply: 4.4 percent next year, 5.7 percent in 2027, and 5.6 percent in 2028. As the Gothamist.com report noted, these hikes translate into an average monthly increase of $10.67 for gas beginning next year, then $14.38 the following year, and $15.08 in 2028. For many New Yorkers already struggling under the city’s crushing cost-of-living pressures, these figures read not like regulatory adjustments but like existential threats.
Despite the breathless insistence from Con Ed that this was the best deal possible—far below the colossal hikes the utility originally sought—New Yorkers remain furious. Gothamist.com observed that the Public Service Commission received an astonishing 20,000 comments from the public on the proposed rate increases, most of them steeped in raw outrage. Con Ed’s initial request would have triggered unprecedented hikes: a nearly 13 percent jump in gas bills—a staggering $46.42 more each month—and a 19 percent increase in electric bills. After months of pressure, the utility and state regulators scaled back the numbers, reducing the gas revenue request by almost 60 percent and the electricity request by roughly 34 percent.
Yet this retreat has done little to placate the public. The comments recorded by the PSC read like dispatches from a city on the brink. As Gothamist.com reported, one New Yorker, Lauren Boudreau, captured the mood with unrestrained fury, warning that she would be unable to cool herself in the summer or heat her home in the winter if rates increased again. “I will burn up during the summer; freeze in the winter and work by candlelight, you greedy a– backwards sorry excuse for a company,” she wrote. “Do you want an angry mob on your hands? This is how you get one.”
Con Ed responded to the White House-centered uproar tactfully, at least in tone. “We recognize affordability is a critical issue and work every day to balance the investments needed for resilience and reliability with customer costs,” spokesperson Jamie McShane told reporters. The utility, he added, “welcomes the opportunity to partner with the mayor-elect on solutions that make New York affordable for everyone.” Yet one sensed that McShane himself understood the remark would fall flat. For a city that has watched its utility bills soar while Con Ed profits rose by 66 percent over the past decade, such bromides are as potent as offering chamomile tea at a five-alarm fire.
The structural problem, as the Gothamist.com report explained in stark detail, is that the design of New York’s energy system practically guarantees rising costs. State law promises Con Ed a fixed return on equity, which is baked directly into customers’ bills and incentivizes the company to spend—not to economize. The more capital infrastructure a utility builds, the more profit it is legally entitled to collect. And because gas pipelines, hookups, and distribution systems require extraordinary amounts of capital investment, the state’s regulatory framework has historically rewarded expansion of fossil-fuel infrastructure even as legislators insist they are racing toward a carbon-neutral future.
This perverse financial architecture is visible in Con Ed’s own filings, which show that the largest capital expenditure in its gas system relates not to climate-conscious upgrades or modernization but simply to connecting new customers to the grid. For years, the utility relied on the notorious “100-foot rule,” which declared new gas hookups “free” as long as the property in question was located within 100 feet of an existing gas pipeline. The reality, as environmental advocates repeatedly told Gothamist.com, is that nothing was free; the cost simply shifted to every other gas customer in the city. The result was a quiet subsidy of approximately $200 million per year—paid by ratepayers who often had no idea their bills were funding a policy widely considered outdated and environmentally harmful.
The New York Legislature finally voted to repeal the 100-foot rule during the last legislative session, but the bill now sits unsigned on Governor Kathy Hochul’s desk. And Con Ed, which opposed the repeal, continues to operate under the old framework until Hochul either signs or vetoes the measure. The governor’s delay has become a flashpoint for critics who believe she is proving far more deferential to the utility than to the needs of New Yorkers.
Kim Fraczek, director of the Sane Energy Project, articulated this frustration clearly in comments to Gothamist.com, noting that the governor’s hesitancy forces ratepayers to shoulder the cost of infrastructure expansion even as the state’s climate law mandates the retirement of the entire gas system by the end of the 2030s. “It’s not that the cost of gas is going up,” Fraczek said. “It’s just that we’re all paying for the extra infrastructure.” In her view, the governor’s reluctance to sign the repeal bill “is really saddling Con Edison customers with hefty rate hikes just because she won’t act.”
The city comptroller’s office estimates that 30 percent of New Yorkers cannot afford their energy bills. Over the last five years, approximately 3.5 million households have fallen behind on payments, and nearly one-quarter have experienced power shutoffs. These figures, which Gothamist.com contextualized in a sobering review of the city’s energy affordability crisis, reveal a chasm between the rhetoric of affordability and the lived experience of millions.
As Astoria resident Eli Lind wrote in one of the thousands of PSC comments, “This is not an optional expense. Between utilities, rent and groceries, the non-negotiable cost of living is putting a strain on incomes and pushing people out.”
The structural inequities baked into the state’s utility regulation system have long been known to policy experts, but the rate hike debate has thrust these issues into the public consciousness with unprecedented clarity. For the first time in recent memory, a majority of New Yorkers saw their political leadership—from the White House to City Hall—publicly turning their anger not merely toward abstract forces like inflation but toward a specific corporation whose power flows, quite literally, into every home.
Yet what makes this moment so linguistically and politically curious is the rare alignment between Trump and Mamdani, two men who embody opposing visions of America. Trump, whose administration sought to expand fossil fuel extraction and deregulate energy markets, and Mamdani, whose political identity is rooted in the progressive left and whose platform includes decarbonization and public ownership models of energy distribution, found themselves appealing to the same public grievance. As the report at Gothamist.com noted, Con Ed has for years been the city’s most consistent bipartisan piñata, simultaneously criticized by environmentalists, libertarians, socialists, conservatives, business leaders, and tenants organizations.
But this latest convergence of outrage is different. For New Yorkers, the rate hikes represent the convergence of financial strain, political frustration, and environmental conflict. Rising utility bills now intersect with rising housing costs, rising grocery prices, rising transit fares, and rising property taxes. These expenses collectively produce a sense of suffocation, especially among working-class residents who increasingly feel that the city is actively—and perhaps irreversibly—closing its doors to them.
Gothamist.com’s report shows that many of the supporters of the new rate agreement, including the Alliance for a Green Economy and the City of New York itself, viewed the settlement as a pragmatic compromise rather than a victory. But that nuance was largely lost on the broader public, who saw only the raw arithmetic of rising bills and the long shadow of a utility whose profits have steadily outpaced household incomes. The frustration has, in turn, fueled growing calls for structural reform—including proposals for the city to study the feasibility of municipalizing its energy grid, as some progressive lawmakers have openly advocated. Whether those proposals gain traction in a political climate dominated by budget crises, security concerns, and housing battles remains uncertain.
The backdrop to all this, as the Gothamist.com report observed, is a city undergoing extraordinary transition. With a new mayor whose political identity sharply diverges from that of his predecessor and a president increasingly willing to engage directly in local policy fights, the future of New York’s energy governance has become a national political story. The White House moment between Trump and Mamdani may ultimately prove symbolic, but symbolism in politics can exert gravitational force. It can frame narratives, redirect attention, and create unexpected pressure on institutions that previously operated with impunity.
Con Edison—long accustomed to navigating public dissatisfaction with well-oiled statements about investment, resilience, and reliability—now finds itself in an unusual position. It is not merely facing the familiar critiques of activists or regulatory watchdogs. It is now being publicly challenged by the two most powerful political figures representing New York’s civic future: a conservative president promising to reassert national control over state-level issues and a socialist mayor-elect pledging to overhaul the city’s economic architecture from the ground up.
The coming years will therefore unfold not merely as a debate over rates but as a much broader struggle over the future shape of New York’s energy landscape—and, by extension, its affordability, livability, and capacity to retain its diverse population. Gothamist.com has framed this moment not as a temporary policy conflict but as a pivot point that will determine whether New York’s energy system remains a corporate-driven utility model or transitions toward a more democratized framework aligned with its climate mandates.
For now, the rate increases are locked in. They will arrive with the force of inevitability, landing in the mailboxes of millions of New Yorkers who already fear that their city is becoming financially uninhabitable. But with presidential pressure, mayoral agenda-setting, grassroots agitation, and public outrage all converging on Con Ed at the same moment, the political equilibrium surrounding New York’s energy system appears to be shifting. Whether that shift leads to reform, confrontation, or further entrenchment remains unclear.
But one thing is certain, as Gothamist.com has shown with relentless clarity: this is not simply a story about kilowatt hours or therms or infrastructure replacement schedules. It is a story about power—electric, political, economic, and moral. And for the first time in decades, billions of dollars, millions of ratepayers, and the future of New York City itself all sit squarely in the crosshairs of that debate.