The Municipal Electric and Gas Alliance (MEGA) joins municipal leaders, colleagues, and friends across New York in celebrating the life and legacy of Barbara Blanchard, whose vision, dedication, and leadership helped lay the foundation for the organization that has helped hundreds of local governments collaborate to save millions of dollars in energy costs. She was 91.
As a member of the Tompkins County legislature in 1998, Barbara attended NYSAC’s annual Fall Conference in Syracuse and walked into a seminar on the future of energy and utility deregulation. It was not the seminar she was looking for, but she sat down because it seemed interesting to her, perhaps more interesting than the session she was looking for.
That is where the Municipal Electric and Gas Alliance began.
From that conference, Barbara brought the idea of cooperative energy purchasing to her county and its leader, the late Stuart Stein. The consultant from the NYSAC seminar was invited to Ithaca to brief the legislators. Then, Barbara and her colleagues reached out to the leadership of Tioga County to determine that county’s interest in collaborating on “group energy buying.” With Barbara’s encouragement, Governor Pataki’s office helped persuade the Public Service Commission to cooperate, and thus began the Tompkins and Tioga Counties Electric and Gas Alliance, which, in a very few years, renamed and incorporated itself as MEGA.
This origin story is a shining example of the impact of Barbara’s insatiable curiosity, her desire to find pragmatic solutions, and her ability to work across the political spectrum to achieve good results for the taxpayers.
MEGA is today a key program partnered with NYSAC to serve municipalities and public agencies at all levels with the procurement of energy supplies and services in accordance with legal requirements.
Over the years after those formative events, Barbara served as Executive Director of MEGA and later in a capacity as Member Relations manager. She traveled throughout the state, from St. Lawrence and Clinton Counties to Putnam, Genesee, Washington, and Cattaraugus, and everywhere in between. Her grace, dedication, and commitment made MEGA attractive to local officials and easy to understand.
Her work helped nearly 300 public agencies save millions of dollars on electricity and natural gas costs. She also helped advance more than two dozen renewable energy projects, demonstrating that clean energy could meet climate goals while also delivering real savings for fiscally responsible local leaders.
Along the way, MEGA formed its Board of Directors, comprised of leaders from participating counties, a group that developed lasting friendships crossing all political boundaries, and brought special joy to Barbara as well. All involved felt (and still feel) a justified sense of fulfillment that an intermunicipal program created by counties had accomplished so much for local governments, school districts, and non-profits across the state.
