Word: cons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Con Ed stock plunged to $6 a share, and the company gave every appearance of being a financial basket case, rather like the city it served...
...since then Con Ed's situation has brightened considerably. The company now operates on a comfortable profit margin, thanks to $678 million in rate increases won in the past 2% years. (Con Ed's electricity rate, now 10.10 per kilowatt-hour, has doubled since 1972 and is 17% above the national average.) More important, the $600 million brought in by sale of the two generating plants eliminated the need to borrow for improvements for some time. The $1 billion or so that the company plans to spend on new plant and equipment over the next three years will...
...Con Ed really be as poorly run as its detractors say it is? The company has always been a tempting target, partly because of its very size. Besides being New York City's biggest taxpayer ($471 million last year) and second largest private employer (25,371 workers), it operates a vast power system comprising 118,000 miles of overhead and underground wires, cables, gas mains and steam pipes, as well as 15 generating plants and battalions of maintenance crews that seem to be forever tearing up city streets. When Luce was brought in to run the company...
Testy Relations. Luce started off briskly enough. He revamped virtually the entire 55-member top-management team at Con Ed, bringing in many new executives from the outside. He ordered a variety of improvements to reduce chances of future system-wide blackouts, and encouraged natural-gas conservation. To better the company's testy relations with its customers, he scrapped the gratuitous DIG WE MUST signs that work crews used to place at their street excavations, emphasized pollution-control efforts and set up special offices to handle complaints...
...spring of 1974, the whipsaw effect of recession and rising costs-particularly for oil, which fuels 80% of Con Ed's generating capacity-left the company strapped. Realizing that it could not afford to complete its two new generating plants, let alone begin construction at Storm King-even if environmental objections were overcome-Con Ed sold the two plants to the state power authority. Most dramatic of all, the company skipped its regular 450 quarterly dividend. From a high...