New York State just struggled to close $1Billion budget gap. Where in hell is it going to get another $4-5 billion to bail out LIPA?

The history of how LIPA got to where it is today.

In a 10+ year construction project that was originally estimated at $75 million, but ultimately cost $2 billion, LILCO (Long Island Lighting Company) built the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant. It was completed in 1984. In 1983, the Legislature in Suffolk County, where the plant was located, voted not to allow the plant to come online because there was no safe way to evacuate Long Islanders in the event of a meltdown or other serious event. Other municipal entities throughout Long Island followed suit.

As the sun set on Veterans Day, 2012, tens of thousands of homes on New York’s Long Island prepared to spend another night in darkness. The lack of light was not part of any particular memorial or observance; instead, it was the noisome and needless culmination of decades of mismanagement and malfeasance by a power company still struggling to pay for a now-moldering nuclear plant that never provided a single usable kilowatt to the region’s utility customers.