Tacoma Beats the Electric Company in Court and Keeps Selling Cheap Light
A Pierce County judge ruled the city may supply its own electricity — and that the private Commercial Electric Light Company has no right to shut down a competitor whose prices are simply too low for it to match.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
TACOMA, Aug. 13. — [Special.] — The superior court has decided that the city has the right to supply citizens with electric light, and that the Commercial Electric Light Company cannot restrain it. The Commercial company recently asked for an injunction to restrain the city from making use of its newly acquired electric light system in furnishing light to the people who wanted it. It claimed that the city was making prices too low, and it was intimated that the company would have to go out of business if the city was not restrained. The court, however, restrains the city from discriminating in its charges for light, or selling light for any other price than is fixed by ordinance.
“It claimed that the city was making prices too low, and it was intimated that the company would have to go out of business if the city was not restrained.”
The 1894 fight over whether a city may undercut a private utility is the same fight now being waged over municipal broadband, public power and city-run heating systems. Tacoma won the right to sell light — so long as it charged everyone alike — and the principle that a municipality may compete with the company it once franchised still stands.
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