Seven Hills committee moves to object to FirstEnergy's request for longer outage windows

Council President Curiosus said the city will seek to oppose FirstEnergy's pending request to the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO) to allow longer permitted outage windows and higher annual averages for interruptions.

At the Public Works committee meeting, Curiosus said he reviewed statistics provided by FirstEnergy showing severe storm frequency rising from an average of 2.3 per year (1980'020) to 7.2 per year over the last five years. Curiosus described recent local outages and the hardships they caused, saying, "Mine didn't come back until 7. And when it came back on, it was 53 inside of my house." He urged the committee to oppose any change that would lengthen allowable outage times.

Several council members voiced similar concerns about the effect of longer outage windows on residents and businesses and the difficulty of relying on the utility to trim trees outside its trimming zones. An engineer on the panel said he had no additional technical information but expressed a preference to keep current standards.

Council Pro Tem Costanza moved to draft and add a resolution objecting to FirstEnergy's request to the PUCO to the council agenda as an emergency; a second was recorded and the committee voted in favor to place the resolution on the next meeting's agenda. The motion did not include formal language of the resolution; council members said they expect a formal draft to appear at the next meeting.

The committee did not take a final vote on a written resolution during the meeting; the next procedural step is for council staff to prepare draft language for the upcoming full-council agenda.