HUDSON — Earlier this month, National Grid sent the city of Hudson a notice threatening to disconnect its 891 streetlights, along with a bill for $105,000 in unpaid electricity costs dating back at least a year.
That came as a shock to local officials.
“At first we thought they were sticking us with an extra 100 grand,” Department of Public Works Superintendent Robert Perry Jr. told the Times Union on Thursday.
But city public works employees soon identified the real cause: the utility company had not been regularly billing Hudson for streetlight electricity since the city began upgrading to energy-efficient LED bulbs in 2024.
The city and the utility company disagree over the cause of the billing mishap. Hudson Mayor Joseph Ferris said the contractor who installed the LED lights provided National Grid with updated wattage information for each fixture. Hudson’s Department of Public Works was “receiving bills, but not for the correct amount,” Ferris said.
But National Grid spokesperson Patrick Stella said the city and its contractor delayed submitting the required information for about 18 months — from 2024 to mid-2025 — and failed to provide the “detailed information” needed to initiate proper billing. According to Stella, the city and the contractor were aware that billing was on hold until the utility company received the updated wattage readings.
“It took 18 months to get that information from the city, so we didn’t bill them for 18 months,” Stella said. “This was done intentionally to avoid overbilling.”
The problem has created a financial headache for Hudson officials. Perry said the city already spent the $168,000 allocated for street lighting in its 2025 budget. Records show the city’s 2026 budget includes just $30,000 for streetlight operating costs, far short of the amount needed to cover the unexpected bill.
While Hudson had been paying about $18,000 per month — or about $215,000 annually — in streetlight electricity costs before the conversion to LED, Ferris said the city paid only a small fraction of that in 2025 based on what he labeled incorrect bills from National Grid. The low amount allocated for streetlights in the latest budget reflected that underpayment and will be corrected in the coming weeks.
Neither the mayor nor the Department of Public Works could explain why city officials failed to flag the low electricity bills.
Ferris said Hudson will pay most of the outstanding amount using unspent funds from 2025 budget lines. The remainder will be covered by a proposed 2026 budget amendment. City officials hope to move money from 12 different municipal accounts to cover the cost, according to a copy of the proposal.
Perry said he expects costs to stabilize once the billing issue is resolved. Before the LED conversion, Hudson routinely paid more than $200,000 a year to light its streets — a figure he said appears to have been cut roughly in half by the new system.
National Grid provides electricity to municipal buildings and infrastructure citywide, though the company would not specify how many accounts. The city undertook the conversion to energy-efficient lights as part of a push for greater environmental sustainability under former Mayor Kamal Johnson.