Every year, a few buyers moving into Park Ridge from a neighboring PSE&G town call with the same question: something looks wrong with their first electric bill. The return address says Borough of Park Ridge, not PSE&G, and there's no third-party supplier line to fill in the way there is on every other electric bill in New Jersey. Nothing is wrong. They've just crossed into one of nine towns left in the state that still generates and delivers its own electricity, a fact that never shows up on a listing sheet and rarely comes up until the first bill arrives.
That detail is worth pulling apart before treating Park Ridge as a straight substitute for Montvale or Woodcliff Lake on a comparison spreadsheet. A median price tells you what the last few homes sold for. It tells you nothing about what a town's utility structure does to a household's carrying costs, or how fast the lights come back after a storm. In Park Ridge, both of those questions trace back to a decision the Borough made in 1903, and the arrangement is still in place today.
The Bill That Doesn't Say PSE&G
New Jersey deregulated its electricity market in 1999, which is why residents in most towns can shop for a third-party energy supplier while a regional utility such as PSE&G, JCP&L, or Atlantic City Electric handles the physical delivery. Park Ridge sits outside that system for delivery entirely. The Borough owns the poles, the substations, and the distribution lines, and its own Electric Department buys power wholesale and distributes it directly to homes and businesses, the same basic arrangement that's been in place in one form or another for more than a century.
That's the reason the bill looks unfamiliar to someone arriving from a deregulated town. It isn't a rebate program or a pilot project. It's the utility the Borough has operated since before most of Bergen County's housing stock existed, and it's still governed by a semi-autonomous Board of Public Works rather than a state-regulated investor-owned company.
How a Factory Basement Became a Century of Leverage
The origin is specific enough to check. In December 1903, Park Ridge's mayor and council approved a bond ordinance to fund street lighting and a generating plant, and the Borough became the first community in this part of Bergen County to generate its own power. The Mittag and Volger Factory on Park Avenue was the utility's first customer. By 1907 there were eighteen customers total, served by a water wheel and, soon after, a gasoline engine added to handle rising demand.
The dam built to power that original plant is still there. It was raised in 1908 to flood roughly 20 acres for what the Borough called Mill Pond, and the water turbine kept working the site until the late 1920s, when an electric motor took over the pumping duties. The lake has been used for recreation ever since, and it's still commonly known around town as Electric Lake, a name that only makes sense once you know what used to sit at the bottom of it.
The utility kept evolving after that. In 1919 the Borough started buying power from Rockland Light and Power Company instead of running its own generator. In 1924 the newly formed Department of Public Works took over operations. And in 1978, after building a new substation, Park Ridge broke its ties with Rockland entirely and began purchasing wholesale power through PSE&G's grid, which is the arrangement that still supplies the town's electricity today. A regulating station added in 1981 was built specifically to serve four large commercial accounts that were developing at the time: Sony's National Headquarters, Hertz's World Headquarters, a Marriott hotel, and National Utility Service. A later substation upgrade in 1988 extended service to the Bear's Nest condominium community, once home to former President Richard Nixon.
None of that history is trivia for its own sake. It explains why Park Ridge's electric department isn't a modern experiment. It's infrastructure the Borough has owned, expanded, and paid off for generations, which is exactly why the savings show up on today's bills rather than in a rate case working through the state utility board.
What Non-Profit Actually Buys You Today
Park Ridge is one of only nine municipalities in New Jersey that still own and operate their own electric utility, alongside Butler, Lavallette, Madison, Milltown, Pemberton, Seaside Heights, South River, and Vineland, according to the American Public Power Association's New Jersey listing. Because the Borough's utility isn't run for profit and doesn't answer to shareholders, the savings from operating its own grid get passed straight through to ratepayers instead of being split with investors.
That shows up in current rate comparisons. A 2026 New Jersey electricity rate table shows the gap plainly:
| Utility | Rate (2026) |
|---|---|
| Park Ridge Municipal Utilities | $0.16/kWh |
| PSE&G | $0.27/kWh |
Source: NuWatt Energy's New Jersey rate comparison
That's roughly a 40 percent gap on paper, and it lines up with what a CBS New York investigation found when it checked in on Park Ridge's arrangement after Superstorm Sandy: because the operation runs as a non-profit, the outlet reported that customers paid about 28 percent less than they would under PSE&G. The two figures come from different years and different methods, but they point in the same direction consistently enough to treat as a real, ongoing gap rather than a one-time anomaly.
The Sandy Test
Rate comparisons are useful, but the more telling number from that same CBS report is the one measured in days, not cents. After Superstorm Sandy knocked out power across the region in 2012, some PSE&G customers waited close to two weeks for restoration. Park Ridge had power back in about four days. The reporting attributed the gap to scale and familiarity: Borough linemen work a small, fixed grid they know street by street, rather than a fraction of a sprawling regional system competing for the same repair crews.
That's the part of the arrangement that doesn't show up in a rate table at all. A buyer comparing Park Ridge to a similarly priced home in a PSE&G-served town is implicitly comparing two different recovery timelines the next time a nor'easter or a summer storm knocks down a line, even if nothing on either listing mentions it.
The Water Line Nobody Mentions at the Open House
The electric utility isn't the only piece of infrastructure Park Ridge decided to run itself. In 1924, the same year the Department of Public Works took over the electric system, the Borough also started its own water supply. Today, eighteen wells supply both Park Ridge and neighboring Woodcliff Lake with well water, and according to the Borough's own history page, at costs substantially below other water companies serving the region.
That's worth knowing for a buyer looking specifically at Woodcliff Lake, too. The two towns share a water source and a pricing structure that neither one negotiated on its own, which means a piece of the utility math that applies to Park Ridge carries over into part of Woodcliff Lake as well.
What This Changes When You're Comparing Towns, Not Just Listings
None of this changes what a home in Park Ridge is worth on paper. It changes what it costs to live in after closing, and it changes how long you'd wait for the lights to come back on during a bad storm. Those are real carrying-cost variables that a median price, a per-square-foot number, or a portal comparison tool has no way to capture, because they live at the utility level, not the parcel level.
If you're weighing Park Ridge against a nearby town with a similar price point, it's worth asking a direct question during your search: who delivers the power, and what happened the last time this area lost it for an extended stretch. In Park Ridge, the answer has been consistent for more than a century, and it's backed by a public record you can read yourself rather than take on faith.
A Few Direct Questions
Do I get to choose my own electricity supplier in Park Ridge the way I could in most New Jersey towns? No. Because the Borough owns delivery as well as supply, Park Ridge is not part of the state's deregulated shopping system the way PSE&G or JCP&L territory is. Your electricity comes from the Borough's Electric Department, and net metering for solar or wind is handled directly through the Borough rather than through a third-party supplier agreement.
Does any of this show up in closing paperwork? Utility accounts are set up post-closing like anywhere else, but expect the account to be with the Borough of Park Ridge rather than a regional utility, and expect the deposit and connection rules to follow the Borough's own ordinance rather than a state-regulated tariff. If you're relocating from a PSE&G town, it's a five-minute conversation worth having with your agent before you move in, not after the first bill arrives.
If you're weighing Park Ridge against another Bergen County town and want the full picture, not just the comparable sales, that's the kind of local detail worth building into your search from the start. Team Deutsch has spent years tracking exactly this kind of thing across Park Ridge, Woodcliff Lake, and the surrounding towns. Reach out and get your home value, or start a conversation about what a move to Park Ridge would actually cost you month to month.
