After hurricane Irene and superstorm Sandy, two bills were introduced at the NJ Legislature to require the Board of Public Utilities to: (1) develop and enforce performance benchmarks for service reliability and emergency communications and (2) set standards for emergency preparation and restoration of service after an outage.
Did you know that current fine for a utility is $100 per day? Some speeding tickets cost more than what utilities have to pay per day for leaving thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of customers without power. The bills will raise the fine to $25,000 for each violation.
You would think this is common sense and something that should be done in the normal course of business. In the 5+ years since Sandy, these bills were never enacted into law. All electric customers have and continue to pay the price for this with no disincentives for utilities to do better. In the recent winter storm Riley, more than 160,000 JCP&L customers were without power; left in the dark and cold.
There are now two similar NJ Senate bills (S889 and S2221) that are on the agenda for the NJ Senate Economic Growth Committee meeting this Thursday, April 5th. If you are tired of experiencing power outages, please email or call Committee members and tell them you are FOR these two bills (S889 and S2221), ask them to vote YES.
NJ Senate Economic Growth Committee:
Chair: Nilsa Cruz-Perez, email: sencruzperez@njleg.org tel: (856) 541-1251
Vice Chair: Troy Singleton, email:sensingleton@njleg.org tel: (856) 234-2790
Member: Vin Gopal, email: sengopal@njleg.org tel: (732) 695-3371
Member; Steven Oroho, email: senoroho@njleg.org tel: (973) 300-0200
Member: Joseph Pennacchio, email: senpennacchio@njleg.org tel: (973) 227-4012
