Amy Zubaly, Executive Director for the Florida Municipal Electric Association, on Oct. 28 detailed FMEA’s accomplishments and activities to date for 2025 in remarks she made at FMEA’s 2025 FMEA Energy Connections Conference & Trade Show in Jacksonville, Fla.
In the area of advocacy, she noted that during the 2025 Florida legislative session, bills were again introduced in both chambers “that targeted municipal utilities and threatened our ability to deliver and provide local and reliable services to our customers."
“With the help of our members, FMEA led a strong advocacy campaign that was successful at defeating these harmful proposals,” she noted.
“The ability to unite our local leaders from our thirty three communities and communicate with one voice is one of the strengths of FMEA and Florida public power,” Zubaly said.
“In addition, building on the prior year’s successful legislative efforts to protect critical infrastructure,” FMEA led an effort to cross industry sectors to introduce and ultimately pass legislation that increases penalties for anyone causing intentional harm to utility workers, Zubaly said.
“At the federal level, FMEA continues to advocate on your behalf on the many issues of importance to Florida public power including FEMA reform, municipal bonds and our continued ability to provide affordable and reliable electricity to our customers,” she went on to say.
Zubaly also noted that FMEA’s yearly events such as FMEA’s Energy Connections Conference & Trade Show “and our annual conference, and the lineman competition and our hurricane forum continue to be highly successful with attendance and sponsorships at an all-time high.”
And along with the many topic-focused roundtables, events and webinars FMEA has hosted, “we’ve brought together more than 2,000 attendees over the last year providing opportunities to network, share information and learn from each other,” she added.
FMEA continues to be a key resource for sharing industry news and information, Zubaly went on to say. “Our monthly bill comparison is widely used across the state and nationally by agencies, state and local officials, the media and even customers in our own communities,” she said.
“We’re proud of Florida public power’s competitive rates and that our customers enjoy some of the lowest electric bills in the state,” Zubaly said, noting that in the past 12 months and beyond, the average rates for Florida’s public power utilities have been consistently lower than the average rates of the state’s investor-owned utilities.
She also said that there is “no better way to promote the good work of our member utilities than being able to present them with awards. Over the last year, we gave out more than 65 awards to our members on safety, community involvement and storm restoration – not to mention the 52 trophies we presented to the top event winners at the Florida Lineman Competition.”
Turning to the topic of hurricane season, which ends on Nov. 30, Zubaly said “our thoughts and prayers” are with the people of Jamaica, which is in the path of Hurricane Melissa.
“Regardless of how active or inactive this season is, FMEA continues to serve as your mutual aid and emergency response coordinator and Florida public power across the state consistently delivers when it comes to outage prevention and faster restoration when outages do occur.”
She pointed out that when “you look at the data of the last several major storms for the last several years, FMEA restores power to our customers one to two days faster than” other utilities in the same county.
FMEA provides its members with government relations, mutual aid coordination, communications, education, and networking opportunities.
