The Reasons Sallisaw is Swindling Residents with Electricity Prices

When Melissa Mannon opened her electric bill and saw a total of $800, she thought there had to be a mistake. She is a retiree living on Social Security in Sallisaw, Oklahoma — a small city of roughly 8,000 people tucked into the hills of Sequoyah County in the eastern part of the state. The number on the bill wasn't a typo. It was the new reality.

"Because if I had to pay this bill out of my social security check," she told Tulsa's KTUL News in March 2026, "there is no way I could live."

She and her husband Shawn began hearing from neighbors, then from strangers. People were calling Catholic Charities. People were calling the Salvation Army. Some were simply going without heat. Others, who had spent decades building a life in Sallisaw — who had chosen it specifically as the retirement town that sat between their children — were quietly wondering whether they would have to put their homes on the market.

"We made a decision to retire in this town, to buy our dream home in this town, and to live out the rest of our days here," Mannon said. "But now am I going to have to put my house on the market in the next few months, because the electric rates are going to go up so high they are over my mortgage payment?"

The bills rattling through Sallisaw mailboxes — some reaching $800, some cresting $1,000 — are not the result of any single act of incompetence or corruption. They are the compounded result of three overlapping forces that have converged on Sequoyah County's residents: a decades-old practice of using electricity profits to secretly subsidize city government; a catastrophic winter storm in 2021 whose costs are still cascading through every GRDA-dependent community in Oklahoma; and a series of rate increases approved with little meaningful public notice, leaving the people most burdened with the least information and the fewest choices.

This is an investigation into all three.

THE CAPTIVE RATEPAYER

A Monopoly by Design — And Why That Matters

To understand why Sallisaw residents have no recourse on their electric bills, you first have to understand the structure of the system they are trapped in.

Sallisaw is what is known as a public power community — one of more than 2,000 in the United States and one of 63 in Oklahoma. The city owns and operates its own electric distribution system. It purchases wholesale electricity from the Grand River Dam Authority (GRDA), a state-owned utility that has served as Sallisaw's wholesale power supplier since 1952. The city then resells that electricity to residents through its own distribution network of three substations and approximately 100 miles of power lines — 85 percent of which are overhead, meaning they are more exposed to weather and age than underground alternatives.

There is no competition in this arrangement. If you live within Sallisaw's service territory, you buy electricity from the City of Sallisaw Electric, period. There is no alternative provider to call. There is no public utility commission standing between the city government and your monthly bill — because unlike investor-owned utilities like OG&E or PSO, which are regulated by the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, municipal utilities like Sallisaw's are effectively self-regulating. The city commission sets the rates. The city commission can raise the rates. And the city commission answers only to voters — who, in a small town, are often unaware that something has changed until the bill arrives.

According to data from FindEnergy.com, the average residential electricity bill in Sequoyah County runs about 15 percent higher than the Oklahoma state average — a gap that has widened as rates have climbed. The city's own electric utility serves an estimated 4,400 residential customers. Those customers have nowhere else to turn.

"There is no alternative provider to call. There is no public utility commission standing between the city government and your monthly bill."

This structural monopoly is not unusual or illegal — it is simply the way municipal power has operated for generations in Oklahoma and across the country. The promise of the public power model, as its advocates describe it, is that locally owned utilities should be more responsive and more affordable than their investor-owned counterparts. They return profits to the community. They are accountable to local residents rather than distant shareholders.

In Sallisaw, as we will see, those promises were quietly broken over the course of many years — long before the current crisis came to a head.

THE HIDDEN SUBSIDY

"Electric Quote on Quote Paid for a Lot of Everything Else"

The most striking admission in this entire story did not come from a whistleblower or a leaked document. It came from Sallisaw's own City Manager, Brian Heverly, in a March 2026 interview with KTUL News Channel 8.

Heverly was explaining why the city had recently implemented a round of significant rate increases — the latest in a multi-year plan that took effect in 2024 and 2025, with more scheduled for 2026 and 2027. He acknowledged that some of the city's utility departments had been losing money and needed to be corrected. But then he said something that cut to the heart of the matter.

"Here in Sallisaw," Heverly told KTUL, "decisions passed councils for years — electric, quote on quote, paid for a lot of everything else."

Read that again slowly. The City of Sallisaw had been using profits from its electric utility — money collected from residents' monthly bills — to fund other city departments, including services like police and fire that do not generate their own revenue. For years. Without explicitly telling residents that this was happening.

"Here in Sallisaw, decisions passed councils for years — electric, quote on quote, paid for a lot of everything else." — Sallisaw City Manager Brian Heverly, March 2026

This practice has a name in public finance circles: it is called a utility cross-subsidy, or sometimes a transfer to the general fund. It is not technically illegal for municipal utilities to do this. But it is widely criticized by utility policy experts and consumer advocates because it is fundamentally deceptive. Residents think they are paying for electricity. They are actually paying a hidden tax — one that funds city services they might otherwise expect to be covered by their regular property and sales taxes.

The practice is far from unique to Sallisaw. The American Public Power Association, the trade group that represents municipal utilities, has long acknowledged that community revenues from electric operations can support local government. But there is a critical difference between doing this transparently — with clear accounting, clear disclosure, and rates set to cover only actual electric costs plus a disclosed transfer — and doing it quietly, decade after decade, without public discussion.

In Sallisaw's case, the record suggests it was the latter.

A Base Rate Frozen Since 2006

In March 2020, the Sallisaw Board of City Commissioners approved Resolution 2020-05, which began a five-year plan of rate adjustments running through 2024. The city's own announcement of that decision contained a revealing detail.

"For many years now," the official city press release stated, "the City of Sallisaw has adjusted electric rates based only on the adjustments passed to us from the Grand River Dam Authority. The last base rate adjustment that allowed for city operations and capital improvements was in 2006."

Fourteen years. From 2006 to 2020, the base rate charged to Sallisaw residents for electricity — the component of the bill that goes toward city operations, infrastructure upkeep, and capital investment — was not raised once. Through multiple election cycles, through rising costs of materials and labor, through population changes and infrastructure aging, the city's base rate held flat.

That sounds, on its surface, like responsible stewardship. In reality, it represented a choice to defer necessary investment — and, by Heverly's own admission, to rely on utility profits to quietly cover other city expenses rather than making the case to the public for a transparent rate increase. The city was, in effect, papering over its fiscal challenges by drawing on the electric utility as an off-the-books revenue stream.

Fourteen years. From 2006 to 2020, the base rate charged to Sallisaw residents for electricity was not raised once — while the utility's profits quietly subsidized city government.

When the reckoning finally came — triggered both by the 2020 rate study and then dramatically accelerated by the 2021 winter storm — the correction hit all at once. Residents who had lived for years under artificially low rates were suddenly confronted with the true cost of the electricity they had been receiving, plus the backlog of infrastructure investment that had been deferred, plus the shock of skyrocketing wholesale power costs. The bill came due, and it came due fast.

And those residents — many of them seniors on fixed incomes, many of them longtime community members who had made retirement decisions based on Sallisaw's cost of living — had no real warning it was coming.

The Transparency Problem

City Manager Heverly insists that the rate increases were handled properly. "It was done in open meeting, a normal monthly open meeting," he told KTUL, "and it was after a rate study had been conducted."

This is technically accurate. The 2024 rate increases were voted on at a publicly noticed Board of City Commissioners meeting. Minutes were kept. A rate study was conducted. The process, in its barest legal sense, was followed.

But legal compliance and meaningful public participation are not the same thing. Residents like Melissa Mannon say they were not informed of the changes through any direct outreach — no mailer, no notice on the bill, no prominent public campaign. They found out when the number at the bottom of their statement changed.

"Residents were not included in the decision-making process and were largely unaware of the increases until bills started arriving," Mannon told the news station. She said she only learned the full scope of what had happened after neighbors started calling her, comparing notes.

In a city of 8,000 people, where many residents are elderly, where internet access in rural Sequoyah County can be limited, and where many may not routinely attend city commission meetings, the bar of "we voted on it in a public meeting" may be legally sufficient but is practically inadequate. When rates are rising enough to push electric bills above mortgage payments, residents deserve more than a line item in meeting minutes they didn't know to read.

There is something particularly troubling about the timing and structure of what Heverly described: a multi-year rate plan running not just through 2024 and 2025, but continuing with additional 4% increases in October 2026 and October 2027. That means that whatever shock residents absorbed when they opened those $800 bills in early 2026, more increases are already locked in — approved years in advance, before residents knew what was happening, and with no apparent mechanism for them to weigh in.

THE STORM THAT NEVER ENDED

Winter Storm Uri and the $102 Million Catastrophe

To understand the second major force driving Sallisaw's electricity costs, you have to go back to February 2021, and a winter storm that fundamentally reshaped energy economics across the entire state of Oklahoma.

Winter Storm Uri arrived in the central United States in mid-February 2021 as a historic Arctic blast. Temperatures plummeted far below what the region's energy infrastructure was designed to handle. Wind turbines froze. Solar panels went dark. Natural gas wells and compressor stations — the backbone of Oklahoma's electric generation — iced over and failed. The demand for energy surged precisely as the ability to generate it collapsed.

What followed was a market catastrophe. In Oklahoma, the price of natural gas — normally trading at around $2 to $3 per million British thermal units — rocketed to figures that seemed almost hallucinatory: $999, even $1,200 per million BTUs. The storm lasted roughly eight days in its most severe phase. In those eight days, the Grand River Dam Authority spent $102 million on fuel alone — a sum representing 72 percent of its entire annual fuel and purchased power budget.

In eight days, the Grand River Dam Authority spent $102 million on fuel — 72 percent of its entire annual fuel budget. Sallisaw's share: nearly $2 million.

For Sallisaw, the math was brutal. Based on the kilowatt-hours purchased during February 2021, the city's share of GRDA's extraordinary costs was calculated at $1,956,728. Nearly two million dollars, incurred in a matter of days, for a city of 8,000 people.

To its credit, the Sallisaw Board of Commissioners acted quickly to try to shield residents from the worst of the immediate impact. At a special meeting in October 2021, commissioners approved a plan to refinance existing city debt — adding the $1.9 million storm cost into a restructured bond — rather than tacking a separate "storm surcharge" onto customer bills. City Manager Keith Skelton at the time said the refinancing would save electric customers more than $2.1 million over ten years compared to the alternative repayment structure.

"We realize that escalating electric costs are not popular among our customers," Skelton said in March 2022, "nor is it with city staff or the Board of City Commissioners. The fact is, GRDA and GRDA communities have no control over these unpredictable costs. Neither entity can absorb the costs and not pass them on to their customers."

The Power Cost Adjustment: A Wound That Kept Bleeding

But the one-time storm surcharge was only part of the problem. The larger and more sustained wound was what happened to GRDA's ongoing Power Cost Adjustment, or PCA — the mechanism by which GRDA passes its real-time fuel and purchased power costs through to customer cities like Sallisaw, which in turn pass them through to residents.

Before February 2021, the PCA fluctuated modestly with natural gas market conditions. After Uri, it did not come back down to where it had been. Natural gas markets remained volatile throughout 2021 and into 2022, driven by a confluence of factors: post-storm infrastructure repairs, tight global natural gas supplies, supply chain disruptions, and eventually the further shock of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, which sent European demand for American liquefied natural gas surging and pulled up domestic prices with it.

By October 2021, Sallisaw's city records show, the PCA had already climbed 57 percent compared to pre-storm levels. By April 2022, it had risen 75 percent. By early 2022, the total PCA increase from January 2021 was documented at 79 percent. The city had to implement a new line item on customer bills — a Cost of Power Base Adjustment, or CPBA — to recover the difference between what it had budgeted for wholesale power and what GRDA was actually charging.

Residents were seeing this show up as an additional charge every month. Some months it grew. Some months it shrank slightly. But it never returned to where it was before the storm.

Was the Price Spike Legitimate? Oklahoma's Attorney General Says No

Here is where the story takes a darker turn. The price collapse during Winter Storm Uri — the explosion in natural gas costs that sent GRDA's fuel bill to $102 million in eight days — may not have been purely the result of supply and demand forces.

In April 2024, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond filed lawsuits against multiple natural gas companies on behalf of the Grand River Dam Authority, alleging that those companies manipulated the natural gas market during the storm — artificially reducing supply in order to drive prices to stratospheric levels.

"I believe the level of fraud perpetrated on Oklahomans during Winter Storm Uri is both staggering and unconscionable," Drummond said in a statement. "While many companies conducted themselves above board during that trying time, our analysis indicates that some bad actors reaped billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains."

The lawsuits named Enable Midstream Partners and its affiliates (later acquired by Energy Transfer for $7 billion), as well as Symmetry Energy Solutions, a company that had served as a GRDA energy fiduciary. The Attorney General alleged that Symmetry used its insider position — its knowledge of GRDA's purchasing needs — to profit at GRDA's expense. Enable Midstream, the suit alleged, used its effective monopoly on natural gas pipelines in the region to conspire to raise prices.

"Natural gas in Oklahoma reached prices that were 40 to 100 times those in Louisiana" during Winter Storm Uri. Oklahoma's AG alleges price manipulation by gas companies who pocketed billions in the chaos.

In a striking comparison, Drummond noted that natural gas in Oklahoma during the storm reached prices 40 to 100 times those in Louisiana — a state similarly affected by the cold, but served by gas pipelines regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which provided a check on price spikes that Oklahoma's system lacked.

Across Oklahoma, the total additional energy generation costs from Winter Storm Uri for all customers — residential and commercial — exceeded $4.5 billion. That figure is not a typo. Statewide, the debt burden from those eight days continues to be paid off today, embedded in utility bills in the form of securitization charges that run for twenty years or more.

For Sallisaw residents specifically, it means that a portion of every electric bill they pay right now — and for years to come — may be covering costs that were artificially inflated by market manipulation. The lawsuits filed by Drummond are still working their way through the courts. If the allegations are proven, the question of what restitution looks like for ordinary ratepayers in Sallisaw and Sequoyah County remains entirely unresolved.

Infrastructure Long Neglected

Even as the storm costs were cascading through the system, a separate and quieter crisis was compounding the situation: years of deferred infrastructure investment catching up all at once.

The city's own 2020 announcement of rate increases said plainly that the last base rate adjustment "that allowed for city operations and capital improvements" had been in 2006. For fourteen years, the rate structure did not account for upgrading aging equipment, replacing aging distribution lines, or building in the capital reserves that a functioning electric utility needs to keep its infrastructure current.

Approximately 85 percent of Sallisaw's distribution system is overhead — strung on poles rather than buried underground. Overhead lines are less expensive to maintain in normal conditions, but they are significantly more vulnerable to ice storms, high winds, falling trees, and the kind of extreme weather events that have become more frequent across Oklahoma. An aging, underfunded overhead distribution system serving a small city is not positioned to absorb the kind of stress that Winter Storm Uri — or future severe weather events — can impose.

The 2020 rate study, and the subsequent 2024 rate revisions, were at least partly intended to build the financial foundation for infrastructure investment that had been deferred. But residents are now being asked to pay for years of that deferral all at once, on top of storm recovery costs, on top of a wholesale power market that remains structurally more expensive than it was before 2021.

THE RECKONING

What Residents Are Now Being Asked to Pay

When you stack these forces together — the hidden cross-subsidy that kept rates artificially low for years, the explosion in wholesale power costs from Winter Storm Uri, the deferred infrastructure investment, and the ongoing volatility in natural gas markets — the result is what Sallisaw residents are experiencing now: bills that were $100 a month becoming $300, $500, $800, and in some cases over $1,000.

The average residential electricity bill in Sequoyah County, as of recent data, runs about $158 a month — already 15 percent above the Oklahoma state average. But averages mask the extremes, and the extremes are what are driving people to charities and to the brink of leaving their homes.

City Manager Heverly acknowledged that some of the high bills are partly attributable to seasonal usage spikes — colder winters mean higher consumption, and higher consumption under a higher rate structure means bills that compound rapidly. This is accurate. But it is also incomplete. The rate per kilowatt-hour itself has risen significantly, meaning that the same usage pattern that produced a $150 bill two years ago now produces a much higher one. Residents are not suddenly using dramatically more electricity. The electricity they are using simply costs much more.

Who Bears the Burden

The distribution of that burden is not random. It falls hardest on those least equipped to absorb it.

Seniors on fixed Social Security incomes, like Melissa Mannon, have no way to meaningfully increase their income to absorb rising utility costs. They cannot renegotiate their retirement benefits. They cannot easily take on additional work. Their choice is between paying the bill and paying for something else — food, medicine, medical care.

Renters, who may not have chosen their home's insulation quality or the age of its HVAC system, are paying rates they cannot negotiate and into a structure they cannot modify. Residents in older housing stock — and Sallisaw has a significant share of older homes — face higher energy consumption for the same level of comfort, meaning the rate increases hit them proportionally harder.

People who retired to Sallisaw specifically because of its cost of living — who made financial plans based on the assumption that living expenses would remain manageable — now find those plans destabilized by forces entirely outside their control and entirely outside their knowledge at the time they made their decisions.

The people who trusted Sallisaw enough to retire there — to buy their dream homes and plan their final years — are the ones being asked to bear the cost of decisions made without them.

"It's not a matter of we are made, and we don't want to pay," Mannon said. "It's a matter of we cannot pay."

What the City Says — and What It Doesn't Address

The city's response to the crisis has been measured, defensive, and in some respects reasonable. Payment plans are available. The rate study process was followed. The decision was made in open session. The wholesale cost increases from GRDA are real. These are all true.

What the city has not addressed, at least publicly, is the fundamental equity problem at the center of this situation: residents are now paying to correct a fiscal strategy they were never told about. For years, electric rates were kept artificially low partly because the utility's surpluses were quietly funding general city operations. When that model collapsed, the correction was imposed on ratepayers — the same residents who had never been told their electric bills were serving a dual purpose.

The city has also not publicly answered what specific steps will be taken to protect the most vulnerable customers. Payment plans help — but they are not available to people who cannot eventually pay what they owe. Low-income weatherization programs can reduce consumption — but they require capital investment that may not be available. Senior discount rates exist in some Oklahoma communities but have not been publicly discussed for Sallisaw.

A commissioners meeting scheduled for April 2026 was announced as an opportunity for residents to voice concerns. That is a step. But the meeting comes after the rate increases are already in effect, after the pattern is already established, and with two more rounds of increases already approved through 2027.

A QUESTION OF ACCOUNTABILITY

The situation in Sallisaw is, in miniature, a story about the relationship between public institutions and the people they serve — and the ways in which that relationship can quietly erode over time without any single dramatic act of wrongdoing.

No one in Sallisaw city government appears to have committed fraud. The rate increases were voted on in properly noticed meetings. The cross-subsidy of city operations through utility revenues is a common practice in municipal government across the country. The wholesale cost increases from GRDA were real and severe. The process, in its barest legal sense, was followed.

But legality and fairness are not the same thing. And the combination of structural monopoly, decades of fiscal opacity, a catastrophic external shock whose costs may have been inflated by market manipulation, and a correction imposed on residents who had no meaningful input into any of it — that combination adds up to something that deserves to be called what it is: a system that has worked for city government and not for the people it was supposed to serve.

The residents of Sallisaw are captive ratepayers. They cannot choose another provider. They cannot move their accounts. They can attend a commission meeting and speak for three minutes. They can vote for commissioners every few years, hoping the institutional culture changes. And they can call Catholic Charities, or the Salvation Army, and ask for help paying the bill.

That is not what public power is supposed to look like.

"We love living here, but now am I going to have to put my house on the market in the next few months, because the electric rates are going to go up so high they are over my mortgage payment?" — Melissa Mannon, Sallisaw resident, March 2026

The April 2026 commission meeting will be a test. If city leaders use it to genuinely engage with the equity concerns their decisions have created — to explore low-income protections, to provide transparent accounting of how utility profits have flowed to the general fund, to explain in plain terms what residents are paying for and why — it could mark the beginning of a more honest relationship between the city and those who depend on it.

If it is used primarily to defend decisions already made, then Sallisaw's residents — the seniors, the retirees, the working families choosing between their bills and their groceries — will know something important about the institution they are being asked to trust.

They are already learning it from their electricity bills.

Sources and Documentation

This report draws on the following publicly available sources:

KTUL News Channel 8 (Tulsa): "Sallisaw residents report electric bills soaring into hundreds and thousands," March 21, 2026. Reporter: Daniela Julio-Cano.

City of Sallisaw Official Website (sallisawok.org): "City Announces Changes to Electric Rates," Resolution 2020-05, March 17, 2020. Electric Department information and GRDA partnership history.

KXMX Radio: "City provides explanation of increased utility bills," March 22, 2022. "City Commissioners address electric costs from February winter storm and rising natural gas prices," October 29, 2021.

NonDoc Media: "Generating controversy: GRDA seeks $1.6 billion bond capacity hike," February 17, 2025. "Representing GRDA, Drummond files 'first' two Winter Storm Uri price manipulation lawsuits," April 10, 2024.

Oklahoma Watch: "Oklahoma Utility Customers May Face Even Higher Costs From 2021 Winter Storm," November 11, 2024.

Sequoyah County Times: "City approves 'necessary evil' of utility rate hikes," September 12, 2024.

STW News Press (Stillwater): "Residents saw storm recovery fees dropped from City utility bills this month," January 2025.

FindEnergy.com: Sequoyah County electricity rate and billing data, October 2024.

Grand River Dam Authority (grda.com): Public power information, bond history, Schedule PCA documentation.

Oklahoma Attorney General's Office: Winter Storm Uri price manipulation lawsuit filings, April 2024.

U.S. Energy Information Administration: Oklahoma electricity rate and consumption data.

Electric Choice: "Electricity Rates by State," March 2026.