STONE HARBOR – The dominant issue at Stone Harbor Borough Council’s Nov. 3 meeting continued to be Atlantic City Electric’s (ACE) $70-million power system upgrade for Seven Mile Island.
Angry residents, many from the heavily impacted area of 95th Street, resumed their efforts to urge the borough to take stronger action against the utility’s project.
Solicitor Michael Donohue explained “This is a private company regulated by a state agency.” He added, “We have no regulatory power.”
Donohue’s comments had little effect if his goal was to deflect the demand for action being directed at the council.
The utility has begun a 17-mile upgrade of the island’s power transmission and distribution systems. The project includes a rebuilding of the Peermont Substation, in Avalon, to handle 69 kilovolts of power rather than the current 23 kilovolts.
The upgrade, the utility has maintained in a number of public meetings, is intended to deal with the growing demand for electricity that threatens to overload the current system.
In addition the company points to the age of current infrastructure, its vulnerability to storms, the corrosive effects of the barrier island’s salt-infused air, and the need for more redundancy in the power system.
Under many circumstances the roles in this controversy would be reversed. The island’s two boroughs along with its residents could be seen pushing the utility to invest and the company as resistant to undertaking the expense. The roles in this case are the total reverse of that hypothetical scenario.
For some time, and some in ACE say up to three years, discussions have been underway concerning the upgrades. The work on the substation began in March 2015 with regular updates on the Avalon borough website.
Yet for many Stone Harbor residents, the project was an unknown, especially in its details.
With the project started, some of those residents want answers and are demanding changes to plans. If residents of Avalon share similar concerns, that borough’s council meetings have not been the arena for expressing them.
“Atlantic City Electric has misled the community,” said Frank Dallahan, a resident of 95th Street. “These people have not cooperated,” he added when discussing what he said was a reluctance of the utility to share information that its representatives, he maintained, promised to provide to the community.
Some residents who spoke out at the meeting hinted at the possibility of a group coming together to hire a law firm to pursue the matter.
What is at the heart of the controversy is the use of galvanized steel poles to replace existing wooden poles used for the transmission system.
The steel poles are significantly larger in both height and circumference than the wooden poles. The company says that they are required to meet new standards, especially for the upgrade to the 64kV system planned for the island.
The utility also maintains that they are more resilient and that the resilience of the distribution will be more important in the future. A company fact sheet notes that “Over the last several years, our customers have experienced weather events that we never witnessed before.”
This is cited as one reason for the “proactive approach” involving the use of the new poles.
For residents, the objection to the new poles is not just an issue of aesthetics, although certainly many feel that the huge “fat” poles will harm the community’s ambiance.
Many fear damage to older island homes from vibrations that will accompany the installation.
Many at the council meeting urged the borough to pay whatever differential is required to have the lines put underground. The lateness of the hour may constrain what can be done.
According to Veronica “Ronnie” Town, senior public affairs manager for the utility, the move to the new Peermont substation and the decommissioning of the old Stone Harbor substation requires that the 64kV transmission lines get installed before peak load next summer.
There is another planned meeting with the borough concerning the potential additional costs of going underground with the lines for the short 95th Street corridor. Plans call for the transmission lines to cross the back bay and go up 95th Street and make their way to Third Avenue.
Town said that no options beyond that distance would be possible given the time demands of the project. ACE is already behind the schedule they had initially proposed and is hiring additional contractors in an effort to make up for lost time.
What is not clear, and what some residents grumbled about in small groups after the borough meetings, was why these discussions did not happen earlier while the potential ability to impact the design was greater.
Atlantic City Electric feels that it has been open and involved in discussions since a 2013 storm knocked down 19 transmission poles. “We are trying to plan for the future and to provide safe and reliable service for our customers,” Town said.
Residents feel that the “space age” poles and the installation process they require were critical pieces of information which the public only recently became aware of.
At present the project is going ahead and the only significant alteration to the design appears to be the possibility of moving the transmission lines underground on 95th Street to Third Avenue if some agreement is reached on how to pay for it.
With that possible exception, ACE is moving forward with its upgrade including the steel poles which will, for the most part, follow the line of the current wooden poles down to Avalon and out on Avalon Boulevard.
This is also only the opening stage of the upgrade, albeit its biggest part, since plans call for the Peermont station to supply power to the entire island by 2018 meaning that the distribution system will have to be extended to areas it will not reach in this phase.
To contact Vince Conti, email vconti@cmcherald.com.
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