Not sure what interest rate you are using to come up with $15 billion of interest. At 5% lifetime interest on a 30yr, $9 billion loan would be about $8.6 billion.

Lets talk profit. The $40 million represents just CMP. If we take a look at the 2021 year end financial reports combined net income would be about $263 million. If we want to truly look at cash income, we need to add back depreciation, as well as add back interest, for a new entity wouldn't be responsible for the repayment of CMP's debt. That would leave us with about $487 million compared against $285 million in annualized interest repayments. I want to ignore principal repayments as those are accounted for on the cash flow statement and there is whole lot of additional fuckery going on there (e.g., CMP reported $183 million in net income in 2021 but $330 million of cash provided from operating activities). I am also not able to look at a Versant only cash flow statement.

It would appear a new entity could handle the debt load. I don't think it would result in cheaper rates right away, but certainly in the long run. I would imagine that service levels would also improve as they would be committed to serving their customers instead of padding the rate base to justify rate increases.