WPCNR COUNTY CLARION-LEDGER. By John F. Bailey. July 27, 2006. UPDATED 11:32 A.M. E.D.T.UPDATED 4:45 P.M. E.D.T.: Donna Greene, spokesperson for the Westchester County Department of Communications, reported today that Westchester County Executive Andy Spano will hold a closed-to-the-public-and-press meeting with Con Edison officials Monday in the Michaelian Building to discuss Con Edison response to the three weather-related power calamities that afflicted Westchester residents in Yonkers, Valhalla and assorted communities, including White Plains, Scarsdale, Harrison, New Rochelle, Pelham and Port Chester last week.
The Mayor’s Office of White Plains, said upon learning of this meeting, that Mayor Joseph Delfino is preparing a letter to be delivered to the County Executive listing issues the Mayor wants Mr. Spano to address with Con Edison performance that affected White Plains during last week’s swath of destruction that ravaged White Plains neighborhoods. The Mayor’s Office said the letter is being drafted and will be issued this afternoon and delivered to the County Executive. As of 4:45 P.M., that letter from Mayor Delfino has not been received by this reporter.
Michael Kaplowitz, County Legislator, told WPCNR that as of 1:30 P.M., he had not been notified by the County Executive of the Monday meeting. Asked if he would attend if invited, he said he thought so. Asked what he, Kaplowitz, had thought of Con Edison’s policy shift in which they would not pay for food spoilage claims Westchester residents had suffered because of storm damage, Kaplowitz said he was “dissappointed.”
Asked if he thought Westchester County should attempt to reimburse its residents foir the $8.75 Million Con Edison would have been prepared to pay them if they honored storm damage, Kaplowitz said “No,” that Con Edison should be working with the county and try and come together with the county and make a gesture to the residents by paying the claims instead of hiding behind their statutes allow them to get away with (not paying food spoilage caused by storm damage outages).
Asked if the county should make an effort to reimburse its own residents like the county regularly bails out the Westchester County Medical Center, Kaplowitiz said the situation was different, that the Medical Center was non-profit and had improved its management, and that using county funds to reimburse was just taking from taxpayers. “It (the food spoilage claims) should come from the shareholders of Con Edison, a profit-making business, not the taxpayers of the county,” Kaplowitz said. Kaplowitz said Con Edison had failed to communicate, did not have enough repair crews (being that the company had to call in other companies for help), and did not provide adequate information on recovery progress as the power crisis unfolded last week.
The purpose of the Spano meeting with Con Edison Ms. Greene said is to look to the future to improve Con Edison communications with the public and to explore infrastructure conditions and the status of “feeder cables” and how Con Edison is equipped to handle future heat and power demands as well as weather-related powerline damage on the scale of last week’s third storm that devastated central Westchester. Ms. Greene said the meeting would be closed to the press. She had no explanation as to why the meeting would be closed, and whether other county legislators and public representatives would be in attendance.
Greene repeated that County Executive Spano feels that Con Edison “did a good job in its response,” but communications with the public were a key issue the County Executive wants to examine. Greene said Spano wanted to explore what new technologies Con Edison can use so their customer service representatives would be better prepared to provide estimates on when customers without power could expect electricity to be restored. Greene also confirmed, (as county news releases had advised residents last week), that Con Edison does not have the kind of technology monitoring equipment that instantly shows on a monitored screen when power has been lost to an individual customer, a street, a section or a city. The only way Con Edison knows if power is lost is if a customer or police call them, she said.
Greene said Con Edison, in the third storm that took place July 18 in the early hours of July 19 when an alleged “microburst” hit the County Seat (White Plains), Con Edison response began based on police information and customer calls. She said Con Edison personnel were called into the County Emergency Center and routed crews to down wires, where in cases they “stood guard” until the appropriate crews were dispatched to neutralize the live wire. Greene said the county did not have detailed information on how and when Con Edison deployed its crews during the first day of recovery, July 19 and the next, July 20. Greene said the larger emergencies were taken care of first, again based on police and consumer calls.
However, as any person calling in last week knows, the Con Edison voice mail menu, 800-75CONED is tedious, lasts about five minutes, before you can give your information, and does not give you response to a live person and is exasperating when you have an emergency situation. When WPCNR pointed this out to Ms. Greene, she said that was one of the issues the County Executive was going to look at, in addition to the County Emergency Notification System, which Susan Tolchin, Chief Adviser to County Executive Spano criticised in a letter to the Journal News today.
The obscure Tolchin letter on the Journal News oped page today was the first official reprimand of Con Ed performance by the County Executive other than Mr. Spano’s request for Westchester residents receiving equal food spoilage claims payments with Queens residents which he lobbied for Monday. Mr. Spano still has not responded to WPCNR’s questions on whether he will attempt to find other ways to compensate Westchester residents’ spoilage claims due to storm damage, (his Department of Communications said yesterday he would not). Con Edison, in an action first uncovered by WPCNR, subtlely refused to pay food spoilage claims for wind and downed power lines damage, after leading residents complaining of storm damage to believe they would during Monday afternoon’s public hearing.
Tolchin wrote that the county chose on Thursday afternoon (40 hours after the storm July 18 had concluded) “to implement CENS after a Thursday afternoon conference call with Consolidated Edison officials in which they told us that, beginning Thursday night, if the public called their customer service number, representatives would have the estimated restoration time for each address.” Tolchin’s letter responding to a complaint of Gabrel Farkas who complained that Con Ed could not tell him estimated time of restoration, said “there were others, who did not receive the information as Con Ed promised. There is no excuse for this failure, and points up serious problems with Con Ed’s communication to the public.” The letter states, “it will be one of the subjects the county executive will discuss when he meets with Con Ed officials to go over the outage.”
It will apparently be Mr. Spano’s first public discussion of performance issues with Con Edison because Mr. Spano according to a legislative aid did not attend Monday afternoon’s public hearing on the Con Edison performance held by County Legislator Tom Abinanti.
