Bernards Township Considers Utility Committee

BASKING RIDGE, NJ—The Bernards Township Committee debated on Tuesday night the formation of a new committee tasked with monitoring the service utilities provide to township residents.

"JCP&L’s ongoing outage service response to large scale outages has been chronically unsatisfactory and woefully inadequate with outages lasting up to two weeks," said a resolution read by Mayor James Baldassare.

The resolution specified JCP&L's response to Hurricane Irene, a 2011 storm on Halloween, Hurricane Sandy, and Tropical Storm Isias last month.

The resolution, which is expected to be formally introduced at the September 29 session, said the committee may consist of an administrator, an emergency management representative, the mayor or a committee member, and certain members of the public. It would advise the Township Committee on the level of service from utilities, identify areas of concerns, and advocate for improved service.

"This is a great step to create a committee like this," said committeeperson John Carpenter, "it's the next logical step; we've been very patient."

Committeeperson Joan Bannan Harris questioned how previous township committees handled the problems.

"If this has been an ongoing problem since 2011," she said, "I want to know how it was handled and what follow up there was. I'm not doing that to place blame, but maybe we could have been more proactive with communicating with utilities."

Baldassare said the focus should be on the future.

"We're worried about going forward," the mayor said, "we need to be in a position to do something proactive."

Baldassare added that the new committee would look to cooperate with the utilities on improving communication and service but, he added, the long-term issues need to be solved.

"I do believe we need to work with JCPL and Optimum in order to correct the problem," Baldassare said. "But we first need to address what the problems are and what the problems have been unfortunately have not been remedied"

JCP&L said it is willing to work with a new committee, and a representative said the utility was able to restore power to about 50 percent of Bernards Township customers within 48-hours of the storm.

"JCP&L is pleased and remains willing to participate in ongoing conversations with the community to ensure that we are addressing questions and concerns and to provide safe and reliable service to our customers,” said JCP&L spokesman Cliff Cole.

Committeeperson Carpenter, who said he was in favor of the committee's creation, lamented the service interruptions from utilities but acknowledged that storms cannot be prevented.

"It's not about their service, it's about their communication about their service," said Carpenter, referring to JCP&L. "We just want to know what's going on. It doesn't have to be good news, it just has to be the news."

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