They can buy it back in 5 years at half the price.
It will be pennies on the dollar for a ruined infrastructure. I think the true motive for this movement is to find another income stream, because their baby boomer pensions are really starting to hit the budgets right about now, and they will have to pay them or go bankrupt.
Remember there were stories during the great recession around 2009 about double dipping city employees who will retire on two full salaries? None of that has been fixed. So its either raise taxes dramatically, or a scheme like this where they buy the utility, neglect maintenance on all the assets, and put the customer payments into the pension funds. (This is exactly the Venezuela playbook with both their oil and hydropower) After twenty years, the grid will be falling apart, but they will plan on getting federal help when disaster hits, while paying retirement salaries of 300k per each ex-employee or so.
And after 5 years of government TLC, it will be worth (maybe) half of that.