##VIDEO ID:dULOkBykB1w## good evening it is 7 o'clock welcome to the Bedminster Township committee this is our regularly scheduled meeting for September 16 2024 recognize that we have a full attendance by the township committee here in person committeeman Stevenson committeeman hickey committee woman meski and committee woman herand Miss Ray may we please have the open public meetings act statement yes mayor adequate notice of this meeting of the township committee was sent to The Courier News Somerville Burnsville news whiy and to all subscribers and post at the Township Municipal Building on January 5th 2024 great thank you would you please join me in standing for the pledge of allegiance to the FL of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God with liy and justice for all so we have some special guests uh today and we'll be here getting a presentation from our um from our liaison from jcpnl uh regarding outages and reliability of the system however get to the JL presentation we do the opportunity for public comments not related to J so any member of the public wishing to make a statement now is your opportunity to do so if you're here in person you can raise your hand and we'll recognize you and pull you up to the uh Podium if you are participating remotely and you're on Zoom take your cursor go down to the bottom click on reactions click on raise hand and M Ray will put you into CU for public comment once again public comment not related to the JCP presentation so far I'm not seeing any public comment but there's a couple more people adding so if you give me one moment there okay I'm not seeing any um raised hands for public comment mayor okay so we will close public comment and we will go straight into the JC panel presentation so not sure who we have so uh I'm gonna ask you guys to uh introduce yourselves certainly all right all good you can hear me coming through okay all right great uh thank you mayor and Council my name is Jackie Espinosa I'm the manager of external Affairs and uh thank you for having us tonight and we have a lot of good stories to tell you and with me here today I have Bob Flynn he's the regional external Affairs consultant in JC pel territory and uh he covers Bedminster and with us here tonight we have Shan Hayes who's the manager of reliability engineering and you'll see in the presentation Sean is very passionate and and dedicated to improve the customer experience uh at J pnl and he even goes down to the minute of interruption and he's uh he has a great team you know that's their their job to do and he has challenged them to uh improve this customer experience but um with all do I'll turn over you Bob start the presentation and we're going to go over a nice overview for Bedminster thank you Bob give me hi we have people that are joining so just give me one moment sure okay um Robin please everybody's muted is coming on I'm just trying to make sure I have everybody completely muted so give me one moment um the 90834 4713 is that any of you okay sorry we have two pages of uh stuff to go through here so give me one moment okay so Bob I'm going to go ahead and allow you to share your screen so I'm going to make you a co-host okay sure okay we should be okay then come in [Music] okay all right so good evening everybody um again as Jackie had mentioned my name is Bob Flynn um I am covering currently the summit line District which covers Bedminster uh I've had it for three months now I believe uh but primarily my territory is up north in more simplea County in our booten line shop um I am familiar with the towns down here however um yeah it's only been a few months so I'm kind of still learning everything in terms of the geographical and circuit information substation information but um we're g to jump right in here today so you you can see my screen right Robin I can I'm gonna close this side panel out I just want to make sure that everybody's muted before we get into your presentation I know besides you so give me one last past since I just added several people um okay is that better yeah there we go okay okay all right good okay so uh the first few slides here we're going to give you a picture in terms of the circuit layout um I know I think just from speaking with a reliability engineer we've done a few of these presentations so I think you guys are probably a little bit more familiar than some other towns in terms of your circuit information um but this is the layout that we have here you can see uh we have five substations oh excuse me four substations the somerset substation Chambers Brook um as well as I think all four of these in some way feed the Hill section of town but I know that is where we're going to focus towards the end of the presentation because um we've obviously received a lot of inquiries in that area and we've had uh a very challenging summer is the way I'd put it we had oh boy I think was maybe 10 weekends in a row that we were working in our external Affairs Department we had high humidity obviously since May um we've had storms every week uh tropical storm came through as well and a number of even on Blue Sky days or sunny hot humid days we had a falling in my territory um and including down here down in Summit so it's been a very challenging summer uh the data you'll see that we'll go over in terms of our CMI which is customer minutes interrupted U you can see the indication of we've had you you know a peak during e that was a big year in terms of reliability kind of a low some calmer temperatures better weather and things have kind of ramped up again this summer so it's had its challenges um but as Jackie said Sean's group The reliability Engineers are constantly looking at this data um there's no incentive for us to keep a meter not spinning longer than it has to we've just we've had a lot of challenges this year between the high heat and the weather but this is the circuit configuration in terms of Bedminster black outline is obviously the municipality the colored circuits tie in with the arrows that are pointed to them um but that is a circuit designed for Bedminster uh circuit to the hills you can see here we have actually five substations that feed the Hills area so Pac up in the northern section the Western in Greater Crossroads Southwestern chamber Brook Southeastern Somerset and Eastern Dead River um again I hope I have that geographically correct but this is the layout for the hills I know we have a a large customer base in that section they have had their their share of reliability issues this summer so and Bob just to confirm that the geography of those substations does not is not necessarily related to the geography of the service with especially with inds so the pek uh the pek substation which is the northern most feeds sections of the Hills right where they're intervening feeds from other substations correct so typically yeah you would and and that would kind of tie into probably some of the constituent inquiries that you have it's there's different Interruption frequencies there's different outage profiles that each of these different circuits have um you know there are equipment on them and things like that that we can manipulate whether it be remotely or out in the field but um it does present challenges and um you know it it is a a pretty extensive area that we have to cover in that section so that's why there's those terms of capacity and things like that why we put customers on either different phases different circuits substations um it's all to prevent a load imbalance where if you have a load imbalance you could see you know problems like low voltage or or things like that so this is all done lots of engineering lots of ma that goes into this um but this is the current design for the that we have here so next is in terms of the substation and circuit information the customer counts are on the right hand side um I don't have to read each one there but you can see um 1,00 Chambers broke 19 it's St AC cross is probably I think our biggest the 94 um and then smaller circuits like the 95 have 127 customers the Z has 48 out of sumerset but this is the customer count in those um in the municipality that we have that covers Bedminster so this data this is what I was mentioning before this is the nonstorm outage analysis that my reliability engineer compiled over the last four years so obviously 20 I I misspoke I think before 2019 was e you can see that in terms of our distribution substation transmission sub transmission all kind of break that down a little bit is um the best way to understand it distribution circuits are the ones that run along the main streets um different for 206 because 206 has sub transmission and distribution but um easiest way to spot a transmission pole about 90 90 feet 85 feet our distribution poles are somewhere around 45 to 55 I think is I'm I correct there um so we've had as you can see in 2019 a number of outages that were due on our distribution circuit to EAS um 2021 we had a difficult year as well I can't remember if there was a name storm in 2021 that caused our outages um and then obviously you can see if you look past Chambers about greater Crossroads you can see that our our biggest years since then have been this year 2024 and 2020 and Bob what's that pie chart on the right showing sorry my eyes are not that good anymore oh no problem so the the light blue is sub transmission dark blue is distribution sub transmission is anything below 34 or anything above 345 correct so yeah sub transmission would be anything about 345 KB and our distribution system typically why that's why that's important to understand is that typically sub transmission or sub transmission poles apparently are more reliable than distribution PS they're less acceptable to weather caral accidents things like that higher clearance too for vegetation management as well uh but sub transmission back to your question Comm was um that's the voltage and uh it is when we when we say things like transmission trips or things like that that's what we're referring to is sub transmission activity um I know down in the summit line shop area which covers Bedminster I had a ton from the summer of lighting strikes in the transmission Corridor that was a huge cause I know for number of my towns for transmission trips uh a lot of lightning activity this summer in a unique kind of weather pattern that it was going from but normally is west to east it was kind of taking a southeasterly direction most storms are coming off Canada down the Jetstream through New Jersey um I'm a bit of a weather nut so it kind of benefits being in this position but uh yeah unique summer and then this is the breakdown in terms of causes so we have again the numbers are the customer min of inter customer minute interruptions that we have um obviously it's no it's obvious that we have a lot of these that are due to tree related outages um there are Force outages in there equipment failure and unknown the difficult part I have with with those numbers in terms of equipment failure and unknown is that when the troubleshooter is going out to the scene obviously you know the first priority is safety that's number one we want to make sure that line and makes it home to his family um the second is to do their data analysis to find what the issue is isolate the fault if able and get those customers back online they do have the um at the end of the the order you know customers are restored the job is finished they have to categorize what the outage is if they can't find the dead swirl that blew up next to the pole or you know the tree banch hit it bounced 10 feet into the woods they can't directly associate that with the cause we have to label these unknown or equipment failure um so I just I take those numbers a little bit with a grain of salt because again during High storm activity those troubleshooters are just trying to get to the next job and get those customers back in light so they are not spending 15 minutes looking with a flashlight of oh it was tree oh it was you know this or that obvious ones are like carple accidents or if you have a full tree take you know two spands of wire brakes for poles those are easy causes we can determine um some of the others get labeled these categ ories which is why you see those numbers have an increase um as we get into greater Crossroads in the pack so and Bob just quick question is there a threshold um outage that goes into this analysis in other words are you capturing everything above five minutes everything above four minutes 2 minutes 30 seconds what's what's uh your basis for determining um a monitored outage so BPU requires us for any five minute outage to record anything beneath that we label as a blip or a transmission trip um so a number of those sub Transmissions were under that five minute and typically that's due to the equipment that's at the substation or in proximity close proximity to lockout Zone to the substation that we have the ability to do what's called switching um we can do it with distribution as well but sub transmission transmission has the ability to alternate feeds for a substation if we have a fault or if we a lightning strike or you know a Fallin inside the transmission Corridor um they have that ability to do that switching real time extremely quickly um and typically you know the ones that I see again not during a major storm are usually about a minute or so maybe two so so anything anything less than five minutes is going to be considered what we call momentary anything five minutes or greater people call us stain outage and that'll be important to understand the definition as we go into some of the solutions here we like issues so on for and I know when we get to the reliability discussion we'll get into this a little bit deeper um so BPU requires counting those outages five minutes and over but do you keep track not you but does JC pil keep track of those five minutes and under so so the moment we do to an extent because it's important for us to understand the number of operations something would have operated out the field or within that five minutes period it really that's really we really we want our technology to operate which means like you know you'll hear me talk about distribution Automation and things like that and it's basically the circuit's ability to detect the dead parts of the circuit and then make some switching pages to affect less than five minutes pick up customers so for instance a tree falls outside of your house we're never going to sit here and tell you that you're not going to get power out you probably will um but we want these sectionalization devices to limit the amount of customers that will experience that outage everyone else in the not will experience what we call the moment less than five minutes the equipment on the line does its job cascading and then the customers then that are unfortunately in that District where the tree fell have an now the Tre is or not the Tre is the yeah and and they're seeing that damage real time so it's no surprise to them that that 20,000 pound Oak is causing their outage but the person five miles down the circuit is we'll feel that for potentially as Sean said a minute or two but the data also I would say is Sean compiles that we keep that data as our customer history um it goes into our investment and things like that in terms of like worst performing circuits um that's data we compile I am uh as well as I think you are Sean as well we're both on worst performing circuits right now I'm on a I am the last house on my circuit in Chester and it runs through a ton of uh trees on private property and I've had a number of issues this summer just due to those those tree damag uh situations and you're on one as well but uh not because we work for the company because we're on a circuit that has had a lot of issues in terms of reliability um so that data is constantly moving there's constantly circuits being added to that taken off after we make improvements or infrastructure upgrades Etc okay so just to be clear so the momentary outage is are considered when you're identifying worst performing um lines no they're not considered and really quick when you get those trips the the uh equipment is operating like years ago if we didn't have a recloser on the on the system you would have had an outage you know truck would have had to come out reclose the fuse but now you have these automatic devices that can detect and they'll put it back so you having much shorten outage you have moment instead of so that's you know we have this more Advanced Equipment on the system so you don't have long duration outages I'm sure you're going to hear um plenty from some of our residents um who experienced Blue Sky uh those momentary outages where we've not we we certainly were not aware of larger outages elsewhere in the region and certainly in the service area um but you know what yeah I think our residents will will be primed to talk about that in a few minutes we welcome that because you know again you know we we want to hear the feedback from from the customer experience for oh you will don't you worry we've been out few of these guys so you know basically you know what we want to do with that and really we really want to focus on the customer experience so when we talk about moment right is it normal to have a momentary every once in a while of course it is I mean it's it's you know we live in an environment and especially in an area where people hit holes I mean you know the big failures do happen um but if you have a momentary you're just getting a blue sky days for no apparent reason or whatnot you know it it we do need to know about that stuff because perhaps it's not being captured in our systems or perhaps it's something that we need to investigate so we do appreciate the feedback it's not um we do we do want to again like Bob said we we have a very uh we have a lot of motivation to keep your meter spinning so that's the main goal is to to not have the meters not spin for a long period of time and just so I understand so even though the the moment are not going to the BPU you're looking at them from a reliability standpoint when we see them they're not tracked the same way it's sometimes difficult for us to see them there's several main mechanisms which we kind of roll data and Clump data together customer input you know we have the apps people call operation or or or skate control devices on the line that have visibility to when outages are will also give us feedback uh and then obviously the boots on the ground so you know sometimes you know when it comes for like the customer perspective Ive you know people are frustrated they decide not to tell us when like hey I just had like five moment within the last hour okay well something like that might not have been captured because a not enough calls were generated or B nobody there's no troubleshooter went out there to see that you know there was something going on with Galloping lines or something unusual so it's not to say that we captured everything but we're interested in everything in all aspects even to the moment we want to make it Improvement where we can I've heard some pretty weird stuff with what's going on with some of the infrastructure you know between animal guarding Galloping wires transient faults you know Twigs that are caught up in the wires in places and you know a lot of the times it's the customers who point that stuff out to us were're able to go out and address it so I may if you're comfortable it to you these I mean just keep talking um I'm I'm coming off the tail end of a cold my kids's been in school for three weeks already it's like you know it doesn't it's you know it's it happened pretty quick I guess but um so this slide here the um the this is a couple of different projects or upgrades that we kind of have in the works or I would say in the vicinity which will help reliability in in this area um you know Bedminster but you know we also have a focus on the hills on the next slide I think yeah so basically what we've noticed is you know on a couple of these different circuits you know we've had seven plus outages in the last 12 months you know some of these um some of these Concepts or some of these you know reliability performance on a circuit will cause it to end up on what we call our high highest priority circuit list um and you know out of all the circuits in Jersey you know there has to be a couple of metrics that it meets we we track you know the frequency of outages that customers experience the best we can and we also look at the duration of the outages that the customers are experiencing and obviously want to keep the frequencies and the durations down where we can um so in in some of these circuits we've had you know seven plus outages in the last 12 months you guys have seen the customer minutes of interruption on the last couple of slides and just you know to level set where that is you know when you see 9 million on a circuit per year that's that's a lot I mean so that that's that's that's elevated when we see you know a couple hundred thousands of customer minutes I mean we could have had a couple smaller outages with longer durations or we could have had frequent outages you know that happen in different areas of the circuit for you know all year long so our reliability the engineers to have to do a pretty good job at analyzing each circuit and we usually do that based off on the fiveyear out average and so what we've done is we've actually put together a couple of projects in in and around this area you know we're we're dumping about $800,000 on a project on an adjacent circuit to strengthen strengthen the circuit in terms of tying it upgrading the infrastructure because we're looking for abilities to to pick up the circuits and back feed the circuits where possible at at at at First Energy in general but jcpnl kind of led the charge a little bit is we want to develop a standard for overhead circuits and we're calling it our Circuit of the future and what that really entails is is increased sectionalization and protective devices so you know again we sectionalize circuits and when we do that we can create what we call Premier operating districts or pods and the idea of a pod is exactly what I was talking about you know previously where I can't sit here and tell you that if a tree falls outside of your home unfortunately you know it's it's going to happen and your power will probably go out and unfortunately for you if it's your trees you're going to bring your neighbor's power out too probably um but what we were trying to do is make it so that if a tree falls down the line five miles down the line we shouldn't see the outage right that's that's what we're going that's what we're trying to strive forward and in time we're going to get there where we can right so spending this $800,000 and to strengthen the circuit uh infrastructure to help you know create these ties beef up ampacity give us the opportunity to be able to back feed and tie um you know that that comes with a lot of a lot of work you know and you'll you'll see you know our trucks up there you know completing this work and we're looking at doing this you know coming up fair very soon um we have forestry work scheduled to be completed by 2025 um unlike many other places we go to you know forestry isn't your your biggest impact uh line and Equipment failures uh are usually what's kind of you know setting off the reliability metrics for you and your areas here so what we want to do to kind of combat that a little bit too if you want to go to the next slide is we want to start looking at I think that's it yeah there you go we want to start looking at um you know we mentioned the substations and their Geographic distance and you know how they make up you know say section of the hills and that Ur which is a tremendous urd um a lot of underground cabling a lot of um a lot of customers on the UR and it's not typical for us to see a UR that is five different substations I don't look at that as a problem I look at that as an opportunity which means we have five different feeds to Pro possibly try to help that urd um so you know one of the things we can do is we can make sure all the adjacent circuits and the adjacent substations are back in its normal configuration over the last few years we've had a substation out of its normal configuration which has caused us to kind of not had some of the opportunity to back fill or back feed I mean and or tie the circuits when we've had sections of the hills trip out we're going to get about a megawatt of load back when we go go through with this project um and this is slated to be completed you know some sometime this year I think it says the end of October but I I think that's probably I would say more like the end of this year is that work being performed at the substation or at the line leading from the sub in the lines it's all upgrading the lines creating Premier operating districts and we do that by creating we put up sectionalization devices so you heard Jackie mention a device called a recloser recloser is like a circuit breaker on on the pole and it's able to basically you know like with the protective devices indicate a fault Downstream it'll operate and it'll try to switch the idea for a recloser isn't really that we just reclose to bring everybody back on we're trying to reclose and make whatever fell on the line of transient fault the transient fault does not stay on it's not a bolted fault so when we have transi faults and that you trip at reclose hence your momentary is right because you might be out for 30 seconds but no longer hit your lights come on and they stay on and that's what we want okay so you know it's a windy day sticks blew across the you know went across phase to phase on a line somewh the recloser solid whereas in in you know 20 30 years ago EI either a fuse would blow and then we'd have to roll a truck or the breaker at the substation would operate and the entire circuit would be out not just the section that we're trying to create again it's amount it's about reducing the number of customers that experience the outage and reducing the duration in which they see the outage so creating the sectionalization devices putting them up there creating these pods is something that we're really striving to do and again these things will all take time but eventually will'll create a good distribution Network that has redundency to it which we probably didn't have in the past so so let's talk about the redundancy for a second we go back to the pack circuit so that runs up 206 from the hill so you probably got a four or five mile run to pack substation it's unprotected there's no Loop scheme there so every time there's a branch down that line motor vehicle hits the a pole as well as a substation which I think has need some investment because it has been problematic for years um we had one incident in June of 2023 where it went up and down constantly for about four or five hours so is the investment being made in both that Pac sub station as well as putting some type of loop scheme or redundancy into that long unprotected run now back down to the hills so there is no Loop scheme there but there's an opportunity for a loop scheme in fact There's an opportunity for a loop scheme almost right outside the urd entrance where Pac will tie to I believe greater Crossroads sub right outside the I guess the north North Eastern Northwestern section of the the UR and that's exactly what um the reliability folks are doing uh you know current um you know so I've been I've asked them to kind of put together a few suggestions that aren't just hey how because the things that we're presenting here are things that we already have in place they've been vetted that we've been on on these projects now for the better part of the year um you know what we've asked them to start looking into is what else can we do further and when I took a you know a look at this when um you know we started you know you know stuff started getting trickled up to me the first thing I started looking at is where overhead lines could we start creating the redundancy and the short answer is there's opportunity there so we're going to be looking at those opportunity opportunities and exploiting them um that's not the only place we're looking in fact I'm looking at trying to create Loops for most of these substations in between I mean it's a good opportunity to create Loops because it doesn't just help the hills it'll help everybody on those section of circuits like up 206 like you stated I mean all those customers will benefit from these these operating districts and for the benefit of the audience can you describe what a loop scheme is so so a loop a loop scheme is basically where we're able to from a distribution standpoint Loop two sources together through these sectionalization devices um you know it would be great if I had a presentation we have we have a really good presentation on loops and um you know we have good some good illustrations because the best way to really show this is with an illustration but if you can imagine two sources um you know and you have a section of circuit one section faulted uh the recloser here can can open up and then you know you can basically back feed the circuit through another source and this happens all automatically within you know a minute you know you okay so ultimately uh creating these Premier operating districts and having Loops is what we really want to do because if you just have loops too depending on how good you create your Loops you could have holes in your Loops too so if the C if you have a you know may could be an Achilles heel in your circuit or you could have you know the tree come down in that area that like it just will just take out that one section you got to you got to sectionalize so you want to if a tree comes down you want to be able to open up two reclosers sectionalize the fault and then back field customers and then through the loop back feed the rest of that circuit but that comes with challenges because you mentioned the substation you mentioned the current wires that are up there some of these wires and some of these things have been up there for a while um and we we have loaded up the circuits we've we've loaded up everything we've built up around it you know in in terms of you know people living and businesses growing and all of a sudden we find oursel in a position where if we're in like eight days 10 days 20 days like we have in the summer of significantly hot hot hot weather we kind of start degrading the infrastructure and our our of ability to put that load other places diminishes um so we want to be in a position where we're able to um handle all those loads and again with time that's that's the idea that's the Circuit of the future that was an excellent question by the way I mean you know when I come up here and talk about Loop schemes a lot of times you know we don't get that question as an engineer I just tend to just keep talking so you know ask those questions please um can you because that is going to be a a big backbone of how we're going to try to to basically build the redundancy in our distribution system um our substations do needs the TLC uh you know we are looking at any any upgrades and and you know we have upgraded the substations however the infrastructure may look ugly from the streets you know we have upgraded some of the brains the relays and controls in these substations um and we've we've done we've done other things like you know communication wise and all this other stuff has in you know ancillary benefit to the customer basically like the dispatchers have visibility to everything which limits our restoration times certain increases the amount of us amount of time or decreases the amount of time it takes us to tackle a problem that we don't know about so I mean all of this stuff comes with you know benefit we just have to apply it appropriately and where it makes sense and you know it takes every solution a little different so like the hills is a little bit different than say other areas of the township as well so and obviously this also comes with cost so what is the commitment from jcpnl in terms of making those Investments putting those schemes to update the substations do what you need to do to get this back on track um so there's a couple different Avenues on how we we want to tackle this um you know we have a we have a program that is um we currently are awaiting approvals with our energized New Jersey um and we we built a a fairly large program that would go through and and we had a lot of invest um to basically do that circuit of the future upgrades everywhere and you know this is a fairly large program um you know to the tune of you know over $900 million that we wanted to do I'm sure you know you guys might have yeah um and so you know ideally that I mean we were going to fund a large amount of that through through those programs and through other um Avenues as well in those programs so we mentioned the substations DLC in that program we had a lot of relay and breaker upgrades getting rid of some of the Antiquated equipment that hasn't failed but it' be a preventative measure that would provide benefit or avoid future outages um you know uh there was a lot of circuit of the future upgrades within that there was a lot of loop schemes in that program I mean that that's the the backbone of it and any time that we end any kind of circuit work in that in that program it was to the standard of circuit of the future you know we're talking you know no more than two to 300 customers between sectionalization devices so we have a pod it's 300 customers in that pot only um you know but again yes that all comes as a cost it all comes with a cost and you know it's uh it's they're they're fairly involved um you know we're doing a few uh um programs right now or or circuits right now where we're doing some upgrades to them right now and it's just there I mean I'm not sure if if the money is um and the allocation of the money is addressed later in the presentation uh but we see up on the screen right now 800,000 spent um I guess in a nearby circuit then there was the other reference to the greater Crossroads upgrade um that's all money that's been allocated and is available this quarter okay speaking no yeah they're working on that now the the other thing to for is we we gone Bo Public Utilities Reg spend not it's 36 milon it's up to them they back us but I think it's important to know what's already presently approved allocated you know shovel ready and committed to whether it's this quarter or next quarter versus those projects that are waiting on BPU approval which may be yeah sure at some time these are current they're working I think this week on the one I think it's started yes so yeah both of these projects you mentioned are yeah right and just curious any idea when that BPU approval is going to happen I don't know if you have other information hopefully maybe we'll hear at the end of the month okay we're hopeful and I think we're finding at least in my North a lot of our towns are ready for the investment and and assuming some level of approval then how quickly do the projects get started is it immediate like it gets proved in third quarter fourth quarter there shovels in the ground or I mean how long does the planning for all this take the BPU uh I mean there's there's there's guidelines on to how and how you know when we can spend the money and all that will be kind of worked out through the the you know as as that all gets settled um but as we went into the filing the idea and I can only speak to what we went in and filed as is that you know we have a it's a five-year program so basically if like we come if we come to settlement with you know the BPU and you know everything's just good to go most likely we'll be you know shovels in the ground or starting you know everything quarter one in 2025 at this point time so we're not looking to push this off for years like if we get the okay to do this this level of customer experience impact we want to do that ASAP but the important thing is you have two major projects going on right now that's going to benefit that MI and there's those projects and the things that we didn't put on here because you know we're we're currently still dreaming them up so to speak is the loop scheme that the reos we talked about and there's a few other instances like that those things will provide heavy reliability benefits um and it's it's one thing that we can kind of look to communicate out too I mean yeah I was just GNA hit on that that that's what I was discussing with you in the beginning here is that we invest in our equipment we lack notifying public of the investment sometimes that make better at that um it's it's always been in the name of safety as well as the protection we have forart security before we can share we can uh but we do have projects we have corporate Communications involved for to get the information come to our like have to be palatable that the general public can understand what we're saying this press release of what we're doing and then as we get further along in this we're probably going to be holding side meetings allocations after we've done installations to explain Equip to govern body or administrator whoever needs know that Municipal so that'll be so Sean you still got the uh presentation was that a detour or you still have plenty more slides to go we we do have a few more I want to give the opportunity for questions to so I'll go through these anything else no I I just keep talking so you guys should just stop me that's okay um so another quick update I'm sure customers have seen this if not but we've made an update to our outage map um this is by our provider kubra they do most of the outage M for all the electric utilities in the state and the biggest updat of this map is that we now have a polygon feature that will show the actual outage profile um so it's particularly useful for police OEM fire to get damage profile to the municipality where they're seeing most customers imped um it got its real first stress test probably I think last month in Ohio they had seven tornadoes hit yeah um and the outage map was live in Ohio and if you pulled it up and that was your territory just you can see the profile everything was colored everything at different restoration times and things like that so we are confident that we do get another big storm like an EAS or a hurricane God forbid um that this information will get to the C customers and be uh accurate information to them I'm sure previous reli reliability presentations have explained ET process in terms of the global challenges that correct yeah so theal is that now is there is an ETR team that's going to populate us etrs are called for multiple customer outages um our biggest customer outages were able to pinpoint exactly you know broken trees to Broken po probably 12 to 16 hours you put that on in of days from now we we beg you not to put Global etrs in there because on every customer things they're going to be out for eight days well and the reason this happened was after e we had we had the fastest restoration of any other utility es or Rockland we still got inundated with with people yelling at us saying this is and to be honest to again it because you know people have to plan if there's a storm of that magnitude if you're going to be out for seven days you just went to go get a hotel and all it was was to fuse at the end of your street you came back that night I would be pretty upset too so what we're doing here now is to before that Global VR has to be issued we are trying as best as we can with multiple customer outages to get a user V on there so that they don't see that Global and the global is really for going to be those customers that have the service that was damaged to their house they have that electrici come repairs get cut in car inspected things like that um that's really where that number comes into play is that Global and again for the audience you may want to explain user versus global ETR yeah so Global is uh BPU requires every electric utility to give their worst case scenario for that District of when is the last customer coming back whether it's an issue with a house or it's a multiple customer average when it's the last person to come back online uh user ET is either a damage assessor a foreman line shot maner lineman someone has seen the damage and knows exactly how long it to repair something that they with and they say this is a two-day job or this is a three-day job and they're giving those etrs to the customers so far I mean what we're seeing is they're obviously a lot closer to Global that not saying so far pretty good with these in terms of uh bigger storms that we've seen so far which I think really this summer was just that good remnants that tropical storm Deb I think June um but it's still ongoing still always a process Improvement there're still F things we tweaking throughout this process but um it is getting better and to add to that we do have a team who look let's say it's a multi multi-day storm it's going to be we know it's going to be five to seven days they they will even estimate who's going to be restored on day two three four and then when you get the boots on the ground to get into narrow details we'll even give like you know by six o'cl tonight you know they really are fine-tuning it we're really doing good with that because my phone will blow up when we put out the global yes you know from an oem perspective you know important for I didn't need to pay off I'm sorry just in terms of ETS other thing I'd say is that we're also adding to that of disabling etrs so if there's a storm and we see a damage profile that's extremely large 1000 people out in one District we should stop setting the system ET two hours right that so that is ceasing thank you because people want to play know right if you tell two hours and then it's 16 hours I could have made different plans you look at our Facebook during storm top it's just keeps getting pushed back it's nine it's 11 now it's one now it's three now we're doing getting better at disabling that for customers so they don't see that I mean where that's going to always kind of be a point of contention is when the weather event first begins to roll in you don't know the system doesn't you know it's because I know cuz I I live like you know like you know more in towards or I guess towards PA and so the weather as it comes in you know this we get hit with it first there's plenty of times where you know as part of you one of the most you know Westerly circuits that I'm on my power goes out frequently and I'll I'll get the same thing my ET come up I'll get the messages on my phone um and I find that usually it's it's consistent when the weather event initiates so we we know that we we have a couple things in play where I think we're going to try to you know help get better at that we recognize that because for me I mean from a customer standpoint that's what gets me because my wife will be on there she'll be saying what's going on with these etrs yeah t that to is smart met program as well allow calls anymore I'm just going ask how much of that data is being supplied by Smart Meters versus customers calling the 800 number putting it on the web is it I don't have an exact number but I know that it's active only because I have a smart meter and it's been reported my aages before I reported my aages tax saying average detected in your area you know the standard information and any idea in this particular area when we're going to get the smart meters whole state be complete by 2025 I don't know specifically for Ev we can we can find that I be good information is that pending the BPU approval that's already approved so we're rolling it out along the other state customers can see their energy consumption things like that it also helps when we have big storms to get the information real time calls compile data you know that's couple minutes wasted that whole process I [Music] believe meters from theirs the engineers are doing that right now the engine to see if they're getting power yeah so I mean that's all that would all take valuable resources towards the end of restoration when you start to get down from the ones and the twos and everything so now we can you know be smarter about it and and I would say the last two storms have been significantly improved the tail end of restoration that restoration curve is significantly more expeditious I would say because of the smart meter so it'll be really good for for us all when these when they get done in 2025 it's it's crew allocation as well it's not tires wrench time some's been power since the first day never appli to Tex so uh all right so next slide again I want to go through these quickly this is important I want to be able to answer every question that we have um so obviously this is our restoration gra just so this is the process that we follow we do uh activate our IC process commun we operate each of us has a role in that storm process but the first part in a storm after we've experien is to isolate and make safe that hours from forming life in emergencies cut and runs they're called where we have you know street closure cut the wire open the road cut and runs Li and Li priorities uh where you may have a live wire in a cop car or you know a leaking oil tank their service wires damaging true life and death PRI that's what we're getting in the first few hours making sure our customers and our are safe second is to repair the high voltage in transmission lines um we need our transmission lines active for our substations which then feed the homes that's extremely important East we had a large number of quan circuits and transmission related aages U I think it was I still remember the number I think it was 86% of our AAG be say for trees outside of which is just nuts but a lot of them in our our transmission corri um so we have to get those substations back online then we follow the process and restore our critical facilities and our IP ality the way that that process works is our Municipal OEM are funneling the county funneling their priorities to the county county is rack and stacking them for us that we get priority restoration unit activates and we start responding to emergencies where uh you know let's say nursing home has an hour of fuel left there's a tree Block in the driveway get you got get some there right now this is what we're doing this is what the Count's provided to us this first you know 12 hours so we're getting to these CRI facilities uh they include everything police staging municipal buildings locations uh Co schools found their Co testing facilities things like that on there during the pmic and then from there we're rep repairing our main feeder lines which serve uh our largest number of customers and then from that point the longest part of the storm is those individual customers that as I mentioned PRI have individual issues at their residence with their service yeah um and then the next two slides are important I think one benefit of being part of percentages were part of three rags they're called reg Mutual assistance groups there are other electric utilities we pull from so not only do we have those companies that are out of state if we get class storm we also in addition to that have 10 upgrated companies with First Energy that we P our sister St um and we did we did have I think the last we are part of three of those South Eastern electric exchange and because again First Energy is from West Maryland North New Jersey we have like 500 customers I think in nework state just circuit design and obviously this is p but we work in the nice part of State very treat this is the break service territory we have Jersey ours shadowed in the left State picture ined that's mdle City typical topography but and then this is our inspection cycle so obviously we do annual inspections they alternating based upon circuit U sa forestry we do pole inspections um forestries every four years put po every 10 overhead underground circuits equipment inspections every five years and we have a thermographic camera that we utilize for you know blind the naked eye type of damage on issues this is the cyle that we have for sub is there any indication based on the data that those are sufficient Cycles like I'm looking at far street is the data telling you we shouldn't be doing four years we should be doing two years or something else so far stre way yeah for forry uh four years is typical for the regrowth that we see for the cuts that we make so that is pretty standard and we see it's not typical for us to have an overgrowth or like a surging growth around that 4ar cycle we do have unfortunately a lot of new planting neighborhoods where people aren't familiar that they can't put a huge aelia in front of a pad Mount we're going to rip it out or they're planting an oak tree underneath three phase primary big issue we we try to talk to those customers in advance saying we're just going to be here in 10 years we're either going to cut it like this or we can drop it but you can't plant this under our equipment um so typically for forestry that is an average the regrowth around four years T when the equipment starts to get old do you check up on it sooner like does it go into a shorter review period or it stays at five years and just stays at five but I would think as as your equipment gets older it needs a little more love before that yeah and I mean do you want to yeah I mean the fiveyear cycle is typical but if we have like an issue at those pieces of equipment over and over and over again they're just going to proactively replace it team comes in right right if you I mean if you want to clarify that question as equipment gets older like for that endly change things out which you're asking where like because these inspections are mostly visual inspections so like you know you're looking at we just use a transformer for example I can look at a Transformer that's been up there for 35 years and it may look old and degraded but works just fine we don't do any comprehensive testing that would required us be out of service frame at a time anything like that we hope to find those things in with our thermal inspection inspection tells about any hot spots or any unfriendly elal things that are we don't do those things based on thee well one of the things we're seeing particularly in the Hills you've got ground Mana Transformers so between landscapers dogs they rushing out more quickly and they're probably 30 or 35 years old now so now you're getting the opportunity for the squirrel to get in there or something else and Fry itself so I think that's kind of the Genesis of the question is particularly in the Hills inspecting those boxes on a regular basis might be helpful from a PR prenter standpoint and obviously if you see any that have holes or things like that that people can have access to get that to me as soon as possible we've been trying that I know I know there was Transformer shortage and but yes we've okay our our residents let us know that's why we want to make sure even if it's not a full swap we have we have things we can put over it they've done C patches some they're they're literally falling apart like the rust is holding the r together obviously old old box box is already yeah I so I can understand that we would would replace those you know there there's a shortage on some of the longer time items P Bounce and you know they're included in there that's another that's another thing that we're up against too but you know for the immediate fixes for the reliability you know in your your area yes I'd love to put Transformers big substations in the middle of all the load centers but you know I can't get transfer for five years so I mean it's there's it's just a lot of a lot of time we have orders we have you know we we have a Perpetual you know solution to that but yeah co co caused quite a bit of issues as well as s did the war with Russia and Ukraine like there's a lot of stuff that's impacting right right and we we definitely were impacted by that so yeah we're sorting through the best we can obviously we have somewh for long time it you know we try to our sh whatever we you know yeah to you know to fill our duty to serve our cers yeah uh vegetation management yeah I'll touch on this slide very briefly uh we do our this is inside our transmission Corridor it's if you live in a transmission Corridor you may have seen this the helicopter inspections but also the helicopter trimming um it's truly frightening for seeing that a person it's like a 15 foot long chainsaw that just flies down the transmission Corridor cutting back the regrowth uh but extremely effective and uh has reduced significantly the number of Fallin that we've seen in the corridor um but in addition to that they're doing um you know they're spraying for vegetation that we have regrowth underneath the lines and things like that they do that on a cycle as well typically the transmission Forester I think actually probably comes in here and speaks to I don't know if it's to you or someone in particular department but we give plenty advanced notice that we're coming inside the corridor uh but just another another thing that we do here and then this is a picture of what I was talking about before in terms of the infrared camera so those circuits in inspections are done in 5e cycle um any equipment issues that we have are replaced or repaired and wood inspection poles from typically it's usually Osmos has been the company in the past that has done most of the utilities in the state I don't know if we've changed it this year or not it's still Osmos okay but you'll see them digging into the pole they'll be putting things in it digging at the base things like that to basically test the structural Integrity of it make sure we don't have any termites got hit swiped by a truck and it's losing balance or things we'll reattach guys put a SE tress on there to improve the structural Integrity of it uh but that's done on a 10-e cycle typically you'll probably get calls for that from the elected who sees some strange guy in vest digging around the pole outside their house but that's typically Osmos um and then as I mentioned before that thermographic camera that they use to identify those issues where if you have let's say a lightning bolt that comes down it's an easy connection with our equipment from that bolt and you may get offshoots of that create a pinhole in the insulation around our wiring high heat days for six weeks that pinhole may get a little bit bigger you may have the damage you may have a break um so the thermographic camera identifies those it's a bright screen with a very bright dott on where we see an issue inside of our I think that may be is so we started off with um some of the reliability assessment what is the position with respect to the Bedminster service on reliability right so there were numbers but now how do we put that into um practical terms um is this is the reliability situation for Bedminster um worse than other service areas is there something in there that prioritizes us or are we sitting here going you know this is just the way the system operates and we'll get to you when we get to you as far as improvements and the other uh Investments so what is how is the reliability after you've run your analysis what I mentioned in the beginning I think still holds true is a very very difficult summer um but this is one of the few Council meetings we ongoing with concrete information of two pretty significant investment projects so I think that says a lot about how it's been down in this section okay so it's been a difficult summer right um but once again sort of zeroing in on it's been difficult summer across the the state right but zeroing in on bedm relative to our well well relative to other towns other um jurisdictions actually what I I do want to touch on though and I have to give a lot of credit to Sean and his team because those projects were you know in the works and in the planning before the storms came so those Investments that's what his team does all the time I think Sean you'll be able to answer better as far as they compare to other areas but you know with those Investments those projects going to happen it's going to definitely benefit Bedminster yeah and just as a caveat whatever we excuse me whatever we presented here today is not going to be the only things that we're doing here I mean we are you know in definitely in you know the business to increase the improve the customer experience um to answer your question how do you guys Fair as as compared to other areas um not not that bad actually you guys are doing okay reliability wise but the company still sees an opportunity here to improve reliability there's there's there's obviously an opportunity here even in the the vicinity of the Hills right I did like a population today and just said I'm going to click on six customers in the Hills development and check their outage history and what was the cause of the outage and I think six off of three different substations three different circuits and all six were related to the breaker opening at the substation that to me is supporting you know uh to what you and I were talking about about creating these Loop scenes that are going to be able to keep the sections of the urd intact with the breaker would operate and as you you know point it out you know overhead lines are exposure you know everyone wants to Underground and everything but underground is nice because it's prettier but it also makes it hard to maintain makes it hard to fix when there when things are broken um and it's it's also very very costly to maintain an and put in but what we can do is we can protect the URS that we have by creating sexualization devices so I don't have your rank and where you are what's what circuits rank where all the circuits but comparatively there are there are a lot of you know not so good in real life aspects of things most of those are due to off rway trees I think 90% of outages in North Jersey are caused by offway trees but again like I said just because you're not the worst doesn't mean that there's not an opportunity in the company doesn't recognize so coming back to the two projects so one is um at greater Crossroads and did you identify the second you said it was out of area but that it would have consequential benefits in our service air so greater Crossroads what that does is that that job there was a lot of reconductoring on adjacent adjacent circuits which gives you guys the ability to tie to them just like they gives you the ability to tie them to tie to you so there's there's there's cross benefit there um the $800,000 investment uh out of Pac uh was to basically upgrade the infrastructure uh include including uh increasing wire sizes beefing up some of the um protection and sectionalization devices um so so we're typically you know giving us a longer Runway if that makes sense so so that's uh so that's greater Crossroad substation and pek substation and those are just the ones again like Jackie pointed out that we've had in the work already this year um you know my team has been kind of working on you know where can we where can we make big improvements reliability improvements that are I don't want to call them low hanging fruit but they're achievable and they're attainable we start to get you know kind of ahead of ourselves and we say hey I'm going to send you know $2 million here I'm going to rebuild all your infrastructure I'm going to rebuild all the polls put all these new wires up and then we start to have you know other you know environmental gets involved forry gets involved and people don't want polls they don't want you know destruction and we end up taking years to to make big investment upgrades like that so we've kind of pivoted in the last couple months where we're kind of saying you know we think to ourselves like okay I think we're at that point that we're starting to get realistic with ourselves right okay where there's opportunities where are there opportunities that are actually and when we can do them in in a good amount of time that PR that present Real reliability benefit and when I say reliability I'm not just talking about the numbers that we threw up on the screen anymore it's about what the customers are experiencing in fact a perfect example of that is you know since I took over managing I have all of engineering I have reliability planning protection analysis I have everything and what I had my engineer start to do is I had to break them out of the mindset of saying okay well that's that's storm that was all storm forget all the customer forget the customer minutes I live in a bad circuit area I don't care if it's storm or not neither doesn't know why near as anybody else so like you know we have to get away from Storm nonstorm you whatever the situation is the customers just need to get Improvement and we're not sitting here trying to fool anybody or we're trying to be transparent and direct with everybody again I use that analogy with the tree falling outside of your house we're never going to claim that we're going to catch it all I don't have any engineering Nets that I can put over top of the trees or below the trees but what I can promise is with a little bit of time we're trying to make the impact of that customer small and shorter so with those Loop schemes just that's the key like I really really want to try to create that Network and develop that distribution Network I mean but it's going to take a little bit of time and Sean you mentioned underground wiring and just anecdotally we've seen an uptick in terms of primary failures and lateral failures I don't know if it's because of the age of the underground wiring that particularly into Hills because that's all fed by overhead wiring until you get there is there a concern there based on what you're seeing what the data is telling you right now there is you know directly to yeah there is um as I started the conversation with you guys this this evening was you know typically we come out and say it's all trious St it's just not it is it is Line Equipment failure um you know and some of it's happening in the lockout Zone which is you know that that zone that's like right you know kind of in the vicinity of the substation so it's like basically you know the source is going to see it open up and kind of everything Downstream there is affected so where we need where we need to start working working on things is improve the improve that the wire right and then sectionalize those are the two things that we're focused on and that's why I say here even though you guys aren't on like a worst you know a worst circuit you're not on our highest priority circuits because the your your liability data doesn't support that it doesn't mean that there's opportunity to make these Investments because you know again they're they're Investments that will provide real benefit real reliabil um your laterals just like anywhere else though they tend to be lower sized wire because farther away from the source I mean obviously we don't need to have you know very thick wire especially if it's a one face lateral which means there's only one wire feeding it the opportunity for us to use that same section of wire to Loop and back feed will be almost not existing what we have done in those situations though is we replace the fuses with trip saer devices so transient faults will automatically trip and reclose themselves uh we've seen a significant Improvement across the system doing that um but we have seen that this you know no no help but the bolted faults like you know again when those big trees come down or carp accidents the trip Savers don't really save anything they just yeah they just but just remember trip sa you're going to see that you know momentarily yes but it's better than two hour outage and it's three timesin five minutes and the ball clears you're back in it's three times within five minutes now that might change yeah but either way you'll still see the momentary the transient faults will obviously we're looking at like a 45% reduction uh in transient related customer minutes experienced so so before we open up to uh the public for questions any further questions comments from Township committee is there anything we can do to help you get a that money through BPU I think you already have the letter of support okay can residents write a letter or make a phone call or does that just get in the way uh they do have opportunity on the bpu's website if they want to put in you know letter of support they want to do that yeah or public hearing would be the one oh yeah that would be where we have our electives come out and support it or residents who are passionate about it they can come out we we'll provide you the information once it's available that would be great thank oh we open up to the public okay so what we're going to do is um we're going to open up questions for the Jason kenel Representatives uh first what we're going to do is for those who are here in person we're going to run through the room uh Robin do we have another microphone we do okay so what going ask you all to do is Robin going to be our uh sure walk around the room for us uh raise your hand uh when Robin comes to you give your name and your street you do not have to give your house number so name and Street please hi good evening my name is Susan Greco uh westcot Road I I got that right uh I've been a resident since 1995 and I want very very I appreciate that but then I have to question you understand why we're getting um outages when there's not even stor is like is there a real awareness about the process I said to myself here we're having like 100 Dees for like eight weeks one tiny outage for half an hour but then during a bright sunny day nothing going on my power is out for three out and I want to know you have a real process I respond sure sure so you remember what month you're outed was the tiny one in the middle of yeah a was August so half an hour yeah half an hour okay so um you know most likely and again you know when I when I review the outages from this past year there wasn't again usually when I review outages through through North Jersey specifically there's always a be a big tree component and there really isn't it's the the line and Equipment failure that you know we we have to um you know kind of respond to um most likely again you know the heat degrades the system and it does it takes a lot of wear and tear on it and sometimes there are failures that we don't see and they just happen because they're going to happen and you know we we want to limit the the customer duration of that outage so if you're out for a half hour um you know that probably was enough time for the the the troubleshooters to respond and go ahead and correct the issue again the things that we kind of outlined and the discussion points that we had here about sectionalizing and creating some redundancy that's going to help even those 30 minute outages um you know in all cases especially with the 30-minute outage that I was looking at and I think I think it happens to be I think you said Greco Road or um said yeah West that's right um it was a Tuesday um Monday Tuesday Monday or Tuesday um I think you know the outages that I saw in that those areas were again the breaker had operated at the substation which is telling me that it was probably an equipment failure in the the section of circuit that we're most vulnerable vulnerable in so again we're looking at areas again because it's attainable work we can do to go ahead and try to limit that section where we're most you know at risk uh unprotected zones or whatever we want to call them um you know to try to help that but um you know we what we have to start avoiding is the longer like okay you know the the three-hour outages you know I I was you know 30 minute hour outage on a blue sky day you know okay so why did the equipment fail what can we do to prevent the equipment from failing and and we're we're looking into that we're looking at ways we can you know improve we and really giving the dispatchers visibility Real Time with some improvements that we're making those ancillary benefits I was referring to when we put these sexualization devices up it also tells our dispatchers exactly where the failures are so even a 30 minute outage where we have boots on the ground already there's a troubleshoot five minutes away now they don't have to spend 20 minutes looking forward the treat them they could just go ahead right to it and really take those those those customer U minutes of interruption down um but 30 minutes is a good a good operational metric you know if we had to get boots on the ground if we had to you know send a troubleshooter out there restore within 30 minutes safely pretty good job by the trouble but again avoiding the outage alt together would be prefers but I appreciate I appreciate you know um the Accolade there you know for the summertime um you know there's it was you know a very a very uh a very tough summer um so I appreciate the the spring I think you had like a I think there was closer 200 hour 200 minute outage that would have been like two two and a half three hours somewhere yeah so yeah I also appreciate that I've been watching that brought because we only trees thank you that uh I would like very much for you to bring that presentation I think yeah I canone else here yeah no I mean any I think we do have some um information or some presentations that we have Community theom said okay yeah so yeah I'll work through Jackie and her team we we'll get something out thank you thank you so much also the pres and things I wanted to mention couple things smart very important I you got do so you guys in the meantime I have list of texts with Colin hickey you guys owe a lot every time something goes out Colin cares about so I can give you dates times durations and another thing our local Facebook group usually starts blowing up with 30 seconds so I the data is there so until you get you know that smart stuff in place that's you know we can give you number two I mean I think most of our power Tails tend to be further Upstream you know because most of the hills not all of it is underground okay I there are some issues there but most of the time these are major failures that occur to a lot of homes of time so usually happening on the main road whatever s which is s we got to figure out a way in 2024 find a way to keep the infrastructure so it's always a major so I just want to mention appreciate thank you and the the comment on the squirrels um they're they're they are frustrating and and you're right you know there there are measures that we have taken um you know there they actually so you know I I live you know again you know more west of here on 78 they actually just put one of these recloser devices up not too far from from me on on a different circuit unfortunately right it's always a different C right so you know um and I I happen to look up and and the animal guarding on this thing is it's pretty intense I mean so there and there squirrels is what they're targeting obviously but I when I when I managed substation for for a number of years I I always had a general manager who every time we had a squirr related outage would always ask me the same thing how'd that squirrel get in there Sean some kind of like electric or something and then 15 years ago when we didn't have access to all the animal guarding it's like we always thought like we put our substation so no one see it in the middle of the bar somewh it just kind of like how did squirrel get in there he walked in he showed himself in front the only scares me too is more and more people are going to be you know getting these increase demand so it's only so that's a whole that's a whole topic of discussion we can spend other hour want we got time after yeah thank you but that's that's important to recognize though because it's it's we move on but there's a misunderstanding where they people think that if you put a charger in your house that it doesn't draw a out of load it draws [Music] consider hey you're up my name is Richa iong Lane and I'm also pres of wood quite a few people there from The Hills tonight um Sean you had mentioned um 90% of outages in North Jersey tend to be caused from uh vegetation um I know when when it comes to you also mentioned that you know when it comes to low hanging food and easy repairs um that provide reliability that's something that you try to Target now I know with the PAC substation that provides um electricity to um to our community and a lot of the neighboring communities who um that there's between substation and lington Road those L are running through a lot of heavy vegetation and that vegetation I I can I can share the pictures with you after this meeting if you're interested but literally these these trees if they're being bomed by the fory forestry uh an Department every four years you may want to you want to H some low hanging fruit you may want to think about doing it once every every year or every two years what what road was this this is right on Route 206 between lington Road and the PAC Sub Station okay I will definitely I appreciate that definitely take that back now the circuit is uh well some of these circuits are scheduled for next year I believe for tree trimming some of them but yeah there are there's supplemental tree trimming that that we can do too when we when we receive feedback like this especially if what you're sounds like it's in what we call one of those risky or or well vulnerable there at our lockout zones it sounds like it is one of so and and our Township community has done an amazing job of actually getting people to improve uh ground to side improving of these trees which has helped a lot oh yeah and this this is one area that you may want to look at closely I'm going to yes and the second thing I just wanted to mention you mentioned that you have plans in place you know to improve uh uh the reliability of of of power distribution what are you doing like telecommunication call you you were in Telecom I see some other people here that come from the Telecom background Telecom always has uh redundance plans in place so if if if you know goes down there's always the backup battery a backup system to to take over we uh provide uh is there anything that can be done with Rundy with the JCP and all equipment so we know that the PAC substation has certain theability that she's providing all here can the PAC substation can can it be can there somehow be a backup to provide redundance when that goes down so that's the greater Crossroad substation um and that's exactly what I was I think discussing with that individual with the the loop schemes because essentially what would happen is if pack breaker opened up like we did like I I I I discussed earlier that seems to be what's happening uh then that this was in a matter of minutes the smart devices would operate and then instead of you guys being fed from your normal Source you're excuse me fed from Source B so there is our redundancy we have redundancy built into our system in a various various ways uh but we need to be more and I just know um you're probably going to see there's JCP and all been here in front of our residents in front of the township committee for years I had everybody Henry posy Tom haes CH bian Robert bton from forest stre sorry if I can't pronounce her last name correct but they've been coming here for years telling residents the same story over and over again and now you're here a new group of people what are you going to do that's any different than what we've been told for the past several years I mean you know for starters is is you know and I can't speak to to them and and the names that you mentioned I think I only heard one that that's an actual engineer that worked from the Engineering Group which would be Henry um but you know from from our commit my commitment is is you know for me to you guys is that you know again these these solutions that we're looking into these attainable Solutions that's that's the key here okay there's been plenty of solutions that we may have come up with in the past that just were again these larger scale things that really it just becomes you know an easement environmental issue or a RightWay issue and and you know it doesn't help the customers for years and years and years installing a couple sexualization devices to do exactly what you just described when Pac sub trips out and we have to put you guys on a great Crossroad nobody needs to go out do that it will do it itself you won't even in many cases if the system if the system is configured properly your clocks won't even reset that's what we're going for so you know how are we different than how are we different than the other people that came here over the last few years well some of the technology is is more readily available there's some it's become more attainable we have them the supply issue that we're experiencing thankfully hasn't really fent too much with those pieces of devices and other things like that and again you know I've been I've been with First Energy for you know I don't know it's close close to 20 years at this point and I've been in operations most of my time and and you know I switched over to engineering because I I was one of the architects of the of this Improvement infrastructure Improvement plan where I literally spent two years just trying to study what plagues different circuits so this time now I'm in charge of engineering after going through that exercise so the commitment is a little bit different because now like the background is just forever imprinted in my brain from spending the last two years going through but the challenge is you know what what the reliability solutions that we have to come up for with you guys may be significantly different than the reliability solutions for other people like I mentioned earlier it's typically for us it's typical for us to come up here and tell you it's all trees but in your instance really isn't trees are a factor there will always be but it's not your driver no but I I I you were telling us that 90% of more Jersey oues do tend to be vegetation so I'm just I think I quot I I did say that though that's an accurate 90% of north but I'm talking North Jersey in general like you saw Bob's map where it showed the shading of the tree we have that whole area and and here if you notice it's it's a little bit lighter here there's a lot more tra highway traffic you know you just have different it's a different geography here than it is say up in Newton Dober Flemington District um so that that is the differences here and that is continuing that is continuing what what plagues us now it's the off- rightaway trees that are really bothersome and you know I guess in general you know public may not understand that you know JC pel doesn't want the trees to fall down in fact it's kind of hitting Us in in multiple ways so we get dispatched through out there we have to pay to clean it up we have to pay to put it back up and the whole time this is all happening your meters aren't spinning and at the end of the day it's trees that we can't even trim because they're off right away we can't touch apprach customers and that's what's great about our perhaps that's why we're not here talking about trth prom so well to Rich's point a lot of the trees on that Pac or coming from the pack substation not in Bedminster friends um up pack let me let me take that back too because again as I told you the beginning of this sometimes there's things that we just can't see from behind a computer desk and sometimes there's things that aren't elevated up to engineering from our operations and so we get that from you know adits from the customers and meetings like this so it's very much appreciated and definitely we'll take it back to theam so basically if you're if anybody is setting out of here from jcn and heading north on 206 back to Chester or anything in that area just look on on on both sides of the road for the next two miles and you'll you Tre on wire brok trees soang or at least mention our most people don't never needed a you because we got out there and we are recording you so Robin is going to direct you I knowbody he um can no no no well here go over there okay um my name is Gordon worm Stitch um at Heatherwood Lane in Bedminster um if I saw the slide right you had one of the substations noted five out outages in the last 12 months I I forget which substation it was so that's not so bad and then the PAC one had seven in the last 12 months of all the substations that service Bedminster how many outages and I may have missed this number earlier I didn't here how many outages did we have in the last 12 months in out of all of all the substations that serve B I don't I I wouldn't know that until I I'd have to go back and look at that because our circuits are we go everything is by subst problem is your substation trans you know there're sometimes not just in one town so I saw seven I saw five so I know at least 12 probably more than that oh there's probably my question on that is are there any neighborhoods or areas of Bedminster that get all 12 or 19 whatever the number may be or are they always going to be different does anybody get bad luck and they're just always on the outage most likely most likely not but I I don't want to tell you that that doesn't ever occur because it could back here all so they get them all it could be and again as I mentioned before when I did a SLE population today now this is just going back you know not the last 12 months but the beginning of the year when I did six I did six homes in the Hills neighborhood but just any of those six it was the breaker at the sub that operated so everyone on that whole circuit would be affected that's what we have to stop happening that's going to be the best reliability we're going to come up with some solutions that's going to try to help mitigate that number two about four months ago or so there was an outage and it came back on but it came back on like I'm flicking my light switch about 15 times on off on off on off on off on off right after that like that day the next day the motherboard on my um clothes washer fried which I'm assuming came from that what that since each one of those outages was less than five minutes even though there were maybe 20 of them do we know what caused that response and trying to um Sol the outage that was like a strob light on and off as quickly like that I was just going to say it's cycling on and off it's a tempting it's a piece of equipment that is attempting to restore circuit back to its original functionality that reset on off on off is that equipment operating but I don't know specifically if that's either at the sub or a piece of equipment that's out on the that's that's right yeah I'm no electrical engineer but that's a huge problem for everybody working at home with their computers on with their phones on with their appliances and that's subject to if it doesn't fry it there it might wear it out sooner and you guys are up Hooked with really no proof except I had one that happened on the spot because I had the guy working on um so no I appreciate that because again as we started and we talked about I think the difference between momentary and sustained outages I had indicated there were only it's a different sample data set that we go to for the momentary outages and if there's you know some abnormalities happen like you're talking about this is how we learn about it so I'd like to I'd like to probably I mean yeah I'd like to dig into it I mean I'll need your information like your address or whatnot you can tell me after we're done with this and I'd like I'd like to look into that and then it sounds like a couple other people back here were affected so it's supposed to do it a number of times and not keep going so that like it's supposed to say like okay Thea didn't I'm going to keep the breaker like at the sub like the smart equipment thing and it was well into double digits got last one and shame on me for not being at home and seeing your response I'm sure there was a response but the the clear the Blue Sky outage about three four weeks ago on a Monday morning like about 7 in the morning um I was one of the first cars at the 202 206 River Road exchange and the light was out that was really interesting fun um [Music] glad you guys went there pulling me off I was a little aggressive we got there two minutes I'm sure because you guys have to beet them um do we know what that one was I was on the road so I didn't get to check my uh Facebook and all that I usually that I think that was motor vehicle but I can't be sure because they all run one into the other yeah there there certainly was a motor vehicle issue and I don't even remember if the incident was in Bedminster former that was the most recent one that was a couple weeks ago but you're talking about three four weeks yep yeah I remember that that one was a carple were're saying it was a carple accident no one was a squirrel took down a lineer transformer in pack which was the most recent one probably three weeks ago yeah that was that was several weeks ago yeah yeah that is probably the same one yeah you probably right like I said they all run one into the other srl again is this working now hi I'm Jerry Cohen qu Brook Court and um I agree with everybody that's spoken and Gordon to answer your question I think our street got all 12 if not 100 so it's definitely a problem um I also agree with what Jeff Rich have said as well and I am not I don't work for JCP I have a completely different career however I will say the vegetation management has been discussed with us at at least eight meetings it's still an issue four years sounds ridiculous like what Rich was saying um the five minute momentary versus sustained not being considered as an outage is ridiculous because there's dozens of those that apparently are not being recorded by JCP know and the other the smart leaders are well overdue but the one really big problem we're all on Facebook most of us are on Bedminster buddies and a couple of people have posted on there um thinking of buying a house in Bedminster and they are met with a comment that says Don't Buy in Bedminster because jcpnl sucks what do we do about that that is how severe this problem is so I'm not asking because I'm not a technical person but I think that jcpnl needs to understand the severity of the problem and how this can affect us and our property values so I don't know what great question I don't know what anybody has to say in response to that I mean I'm basically agreeing with everything else has been said but I think having a public statement on bed Mr buddies which is on Facebook not to live here because of power outages is bad good evening I'm Brandon Petro I live on Courtland Lane I know we've been talking ad nauseum about outages um are other incidents being taken into consideration for upgrades um I don't know if you're familiar but we've also had a lot of power surges um probably due to the equipment being old uh probably like the capacitors um being old the underground wires being old um to piggyback on what some of the other people have said you know we've had those surges have caused issues with HVAC systems appliances um where like I'm not having a power outage but instead I'm having my HVAC system not working when it's freezing cold or super hot are those types of things being considered along with outages for where the upgrades need to be made since I know we talk a lot about outages so so can you describe the power surge so I had my HVAC system go out and when the text came and also my electrician came they were showing that my house was receiving like 252 volts which is you know obviously way too high for what we're supposed to be receiving you know since we're supposed to be on 240 yeah we're getting like readings of 252 253 happening at certain times of day and obviously you know pieces of equipment can't handle that you know that it seems to have wred itself um we had a lot of work uh you know we had a lot of calls in we've had multiple people come out we've tried different things the most recent solution was they turned off one of the capacitors I think the closest one to uh the hills itself um but again I know that seems like a temp fix so is um I guess my other question is will the new equipment rely Less on things like that no capacitors are used for a completely different reason altogether um so I again I'd have to go and look at it kind of it's actually interesting to me to figure out what what is going on that's that's where I nerd out you know and try to figure that stuff out because I I I too have those issues sometimes at my house I know we go through we get to looking at get look at the issue again I'd be happy to take your information down and try to you make sure because my my Engineers be the on that do the voltage investigation I guess you said you called in before yeah I forget the engineer's name my wife knows who it is but I I have that information for you because we worked a long time with this customer um literally months what what he's describing is I think is an overvoltage condition that exists throughout Bedminster okay I've even seen it in my house and know Rob and you've experienced it as well these are different circuits where for example my voltage might run up from 120 to 132 136 I know 5% is acceptable in terms of voltage variations but you'll suddenly see voltage spikes or in this gentleman's condition he had a consistent over voltage situation which I think the local line shop came out it pulled a Capac from one of the Transformers but we I think holding that consistent voltage and I know there was some investment made by JC pel I guess within the last several years to try to regulate that voltage or it's part of the the the filing you've done for Circuit of the future but I just we've suffered old over voltage in a variety of places here in bedm over the last several years and I just want that to be considered you know again we talk a lot about outages but there's other issues you know that are and especially with you know I do a lot of things with appliances and stuff and these newer systems can't handle the over voltage they just can't so you know and that hurts a lot of people because you know you're buying new equipment you're spending time waiting for your HVAC system to be fixed you know where it's not necessarily you know an outage I'm sitting here in the dark but you know it's other things so when you say you've dealt with it is it's been multiple customers complaining or or is it one section of customers complaining it's multiple customers in different locations at different at different times but no for example I don't live in the hills and I will see voltage spikes that will go like I said to 135 and it suddenly drop to 105 and then Spike back up and it'll flag back and forth and then it'll settle down how are you measuring that I have a voltage meter on an audio equipment and it's persistent because I have a couple of them throughout the house and all Su I'll go into State because you're getting high over voltage yeah and you should like SE pumps or like pump houses and things like that same they will alarm and start screaming right right one of the things that happens in my place and I'd like to give you guys my information too is any rooms with incandescent Lights I've noticed in the last year or two that the lights flicker a lot oven flicker flicker flicker flicker no matter what bulbs are in there and I'd like to have somebody come and look at that for me is it's happening with incandescent light bulbs well sometimes even with others but I mean it never used to happen until maybe about a year or so ago so like the power is not consistent you know and I think it's somewhat related to what he's saying Colin saying so I would like to have somebody come well I understand that I take you know I mean even with the LED right exactly Club too but I'd like to have somebody come look at just any anything that's I Noti instant I don't even have that many thanks for Theo okay if there's no more questions here in town hall Robin for everyone participating the zoom if you have a question of the jcpnl delegation I have a question everyone everyone needs to stay on mute if you're not on mute put yourself on mute to be announced into Q once again bring your cursor down to the bottom click on reactions click on raise hand and then M Ray will cue you in to take you off mute so Robin order um Fred P I'm gonna ask you to unmute yourself and it's the same direction um your name and Street please hey guys thank you Fred ferelli Hills Drive um I think everybody including the panel and the audience has asked a lot of the questions that I had but I do have a quick four questions and I'll start with the the segue question that just led into what the gentleman in the blue just was talking about earli about studies what is the likelihood of this project succeeding with the feasibility study that you performed over the last two years meaning is the $800,000 of this infrastructure going to succeed or not or are we just throwing stones at it and we're just going to guess as we go along I haven't seen any data or charts so it would be good if you could give us a visual of of how is this going to be or how are we going to be guaranteed that this is going to succeed so the Investments that are made from the two projects that we had we had um laid out our our investments to basically again lay the runway for us to start building the Circuit of the future design to be able for us to handle the ampacity and the capacity for other circuits to support adjacent circuits which is really the driver for what we need to we need to be at to create that redundancy that we're talking so these projects in in among amongst itself will provide some reliability benefit yes um but you know we really need to really build the sectionalization come through and really you know do the things to the Circuit that we need to do to in order to basically um create yeah create the redundancy create the sectionalization and create what we're calling those Premier operating districts in a urd it's a little bit different and and I I don't know if you're associated with the hills or not but in the Ard it's a little different and again we're going to need some other solutions to go through to create other circuit ties other areas to to um to be able to to network the circuits together and again the achievable ones tackle ASAP those are the ones that where the overhead conductors kind of meet another another substation source or circuit before it feeds the UR there's there's about two or three locations that we've identified that we're going to need to go ahead and put pen to paper on so Sean if we if we look at that specific to the Hills right so we know there are sections of the hills that are fed by the pack substation other sections fed by uh greater Crossroads so work with the two where you've got money deployed or ready to be deployed do you have the ability to make that Loop outside of the urd area so that's exactly what when I say will provide us the runway to do that that's exactly it it's it's the ability to make the loop possible so we what we don't want to do is if the section of the hills fed from P Pac then trips it's now fed from greater Crossroads but that circuit can't handle the extra load now that's not normally on it if we don't do these projects that we're talking about now we won't have the ampacity of the conductors to be able to take all those loads and how right now for those two lines right because that's where the money's being deployed so therefore presumably that's the first Loop that you construct do they interconnect do they intersect right now those above is that where is that I don't know how much you can tell us but I presume that's somewhere on 202 206 outside of by the entrance into the hills so I I I I don't have the intersection uh that's not coming to me in M St do MTH stay for so long but I don't have the the U the road names but there's a few intersections with with the circuit Ty point so to speak that we'd be looking to uh you know again try to leverage okay to speak and does that involve from our perspective looking at it do you need um to expand your EAS Mains do you need is there other infrastructure uh that needs to to um that's or property rights that need where the town can help yeah there there're maybe and I'm having those discussions with municipalities that are receiving other funding for things like that so if that is the case we will come back okay one of the things that we're trying to Target is the things that are easily attainable and from just the headache that some of that has been you know we're trying to to Target um C like when I say looking to leverage those ties that are already there it's because that's in infrastructure that's currently existing so we could easily make some small manipulations to it to effect that change where we don't have to sit there and Rec conduct her through an area of Sweetland or through you know so we're trying that's what we're trying to avoid um that's why you know again I don't have the graphs and charts as as this individual is asking about for those Solutions because we're just beginning to put pen and paper on those um and again as we as we're more getting involved with the Automation and that's kind of where we're we're going with our circuits and then and then these are proven Technologies so to uh Frank I don't I didn't get your last name but to Frank's point that will this work this is a proven technology yeah obviously yeah we've we we've had um uh so I forget what our our last actual numbers were but you know when we when we have um you know certain storm related activities we create reports we sent to the Board of Public Utilities and there's a section in there which we have in it's called Sy resilience we accent some things on how the system operated because of the benefits that we've done relateded to the system uh and actually we accented the there's storm in the summer I forget what it was but we actually took into consideration to loops and we looked at how many times they operated and how many customers they helped avoid a sustained outage and it was something like 10,000 customers was you know significant so you know we are looking to not only just put the these fixes in place we are monitoring these circuits for some time afterwards to ensure how well they're operating I'm not going to sit here and tell you it's going to fix all of your problems I I can't do that but I can tell you once we put these improvements up we are going to be monitoring how well they're hitting the mark and if they're not hitting the Mark we well Frank you a couple couple additional questions yeah I'm gonna finish it up real quick because I know everybody else has has their hands up so I'm going to ignore a lot of my questions but I think the most important was in either slide deck one or slide deck two it was very broad it just said reduce outages can we know what percent percentage of reduction that's going to that's going to bring to the community when it comes to reduction of outages rather than just saying reduce outages you know what there's so many outside influences that can affect the system that it it's hard to project that but Sean's team definitely does like you were just explaining they will go measure what the investment made what was the benefit of it so because the system is just I mean it's not predictable you know a storm coming through or or weather there's just so many factors involved you know there should be a verification or validation of this this Hardware devices to let us know what the reliability is going to be which there for would point to the reduction of outages but that's it for my questions guys thank you thank you FR and and fr that's a fair question and and you know look you know we're we're just trying to be transparent direct with with with the the general public and and again you know we're not going to tell you you're never going to have an outage again after we put up these boxes it's just you know not I'm not going to commit to that because it's just probably certainly untrue um so that's why we're there should be there should be a Target though at least give us a Target and then you guys could work off of that so we we have Targets in our in our reliability benchmarks throughout the you know the syst as the system performs um and and you know we're always considering how we're looking at it on a per circuit level or per systemwide level right now we're we're judging ourselves right now on a systemwide level and uh you know obviously you know when we look at what um reliability benefits will we gain from the Investments that we're making once we finish kind of putting pen to paper we'll have an idea of what we expect um but again that's that's a an engineering assumption that we typically don't publicize because again you know just to be completely transparent with you you know I can't sit up here and tell you you're never going to have a power outage again you know so we have an idea where we want to be in terms of metrics but you know as soon as we say to you hey we're going to get we're going to get 80% of your power outage are going to get reduced next year we're going to get hit with like you know like three three three level you know three storms or whatever and we get we get walloped and then that's out the window because I told you before we're we're getting away from oh that's storm or that's this you know it's it's it's doesn't matter it's about what the customer experience in general so you know and part of the Circuit of the future we we use the phraseology of storm hardening because it will harden the system to stand up a little bit better to the storms Robin want to uh yes I'm next I'm gonna ask uh Robert shl to un mute hi it's Robert Shirley from Edgemont Lane and I wanted to ask about the uh underground primary wires in the Hills uh in a one-month period this summer we had two of those fail resulting in over 35 hours of outages the first one was July 10th and that was a 9-h hour outage which seems excessively long for a primary failure to work around it uh the second one was on August 9th and because you did uh you had not made permanent repairs from the first one uh you weren't able to work around that and that average was 26 and2 hours uh two weeks after that in the next neighborhood over didn't affect me there was a another primary failure in stone run and that one still has not been uh uh still has not been affixed that one was August 22nd um so we've had three failures in the same area in 6 week period of time uh we also had one fail I believe it was back in 2020 so my questions are why are these lines failing they're 40 years old direct buried cable um why does it take over a month to make a permanent repair uh you know it failed it's you know the solution but nothing happens for over a month and is this something that jcpnl should be proactively replacing to avoid additional failures yeah I know some of the details I don't know about the most recent one I don't think I got that from you yet and I don't have confirmation that that's not repaired um we can get that but um there is redundancy in terms of the underground I believe the hills has portions that are fed from both directions so we had that first fault as you mentioned in in June um we had given it to to our underground contractor enm to make their pair um they're the ones we use for these I did not think it was a month between the two I thought it was a week no it was about a month no this was this was July 10th the first time it went out July 10th was the first 9h hour outage and then August 9th was the 26 and a half hour outage okay I'd have to look into the July one because I don't think I have record of that and that this is this is within this is within n Crest between the pad Transformers in N Crest and because the first one failed and you're able to back feed around that one when the second one failed there were two Transformers that had no power at all that's when you and I were talking on that Saturday yeah yeah Friday Saturday yeah that that one I I specifically remember um yeah and unfortunately I mean Sean said in the beginning underground repairs are obviously the most lengthy um they take time we have to call and make sure we're not going to hit other abilities um direct varries its own other hard issue to get through but um typically I mean again I I can't speak for certain in terms of Bedminster in my home District usually underground repairs within you know a few days we are reping it antipa severe weather it may move up and down schedule they contract that weuse that does a lot of our underground repair so I I don't know the cause of the one in in July I do know the one in August but we hadn't repaired what the first feed for those between those two pad mounts before second call Happ it's just unfortunate I did try and get in front of it as much as I could to to give advanced notice to the governing body to get to the residence that it was going to be you know 12 or 14 hours but um I can't really stick on why it just and just for the rest of the um for the rest of the audience and for the other members of the TC can you describe the situation that Mr Shirley is discussing so when he talks about the primary can you just explain what that means for pro so and to you if I'm saying something incorrect me but the padmount is TR underground trans that we use for underground development green met box and typically most of counter my territory dual needs for them so that uh a big issue I have currently and one of my municipalities is um Verizon running fire and they're using a bullet I think it's bullet something can't remember that's the name of it it's a device that basically just shoots their primary secondary street lights out gas so um sometimes we have contractors curving and stuff like Etc they can impact our equipment um but for this one specifically what we had happened was there was a a pie of an underground cable that had Fu went out and responded they isolated the fault between those two PS and fed ITA different feet so just different directions coming from still the same amount of power in that moment I think thought it was a week after I incorrect my dates but um the next storm that we had it went F again not sure cause as well either but essentially then the area between those two they had f either of the servs there's no Fe for them to get back until the underground repair is done which is involved direct wearing all new brand cable all new brand new cable between those two P clarification Mr Shirley's question is anybody do anything it would help if you could talk into the microphone because it's very difficult to hear you um you know the the questions again were why are they failing why does it take over a month to make a permanent repair although you mentioned that's a scheduling issue and uh is this something that you guys should be proactively replacing yeah I mean there are a number of factors which would would cause us to preventively replace U you know underground cable um and again you know that's kind of the the the problem with URS right they're they're they're prettier they're out of the way and inherently they will have more more robust reliability but when things start to fail especially if it's direct VAR cable and it starts to fail it does make it difficult more difficult for us to you know uh look at it or or prevent it uh why it took 36 hours or whatever how long you said that outage was we're going to have to go back and take a look at that probably number of reasons and we can look into that but you know it's it's kind of just the the issue the underground cable I mean Sean that it this discussion goes back to I think Rene's Point earlier you know that the infrastructure is aging um it's going to fail uh the hills was built you know 40 years ago um and most of these associations were built within that time frame so they're all it's all going to happen it's all going to happen the next you know four five six years um is the failure a binary it's working or it's dead or are there other metrics that you can assess this line is deteriorating and it's got another six months and that you can proactively make those repairs before they take these neighborhoods down there are a variety of of ways that we can do what we call Asset analytics that's what we kind of we have a whole group that kind of looks into that um age of the conductor is obviously one of those contributing factors um I don't have a number for like a meantime before failure of the cable I I don't have the number of you know you know what what are the uh what are the the symptoms of of a cable that that's failing or you know going or about to fail typically we see connectors out the Transformer fail we see connectors out the kneass fail um for a cable to just fail in the middle of the SP and it happens but again it's very difficult for us to see or prevent if we just go by okay 40 years of age we're going to replace everything that's a lot of cable and a lot of areas and a lot of just a lot of a lot of a lot of work um so we do have asset analytics but there's there's nothing we would say that says hey that cable is is is going to fail four years I have no data that would say if it's 44 years old it will fail but the probability of failure as things get older obviously probably increases I would say a lot of the interground faults that I have in my me territory are di or not just cable fault there's some culprit that caused the issue yeah the I don't know if this I don't think yeah the concern here is right these were these were not these were just so we had Rich CA mentioned before those a wood duck we had three lateral failures in the span of Rich give me what six months we had two back to back a month apart and another one that failed another month later I mean six months later here in N Crest you've had two primary failures within a month and then we had another primary failure probably January of 2023 so that's again is there a c relationship who knows but it's a concern now given the age as mayor mentioned of the hills is this going to happen more and more is there something that needs to be done to proactively address it yeah I mean so what I would say to this is that you know the cables are going to fail but there's redundancy built into the urds that you should just be able as as B saying you know fed from an alternate alternate feed and if there is an alternate feed you typically you're going to have a prolonged outage you know three to 10 hours probably because they have to dig up the replace whereever is the longer attitud was speaking of we we probably have to go and look at that it yeah I mean it was just two it was two separate underground faults that occurred at the same time so so I think this is a little bit of an extenda circumstance typically when we put our URS in there we're we are expecting a cable to fail at some point in time and that shouldn't have a large effect or and or no customer should be outage for over a day you know that's not the intent so yeah you say you have redundancy but when it takes you over a month to make a permanent repair during that entire month or five weeks or six weeks uh you don't have redundancy so the only way you can actually have redundancy is to make the permanent repairs as quickly as possible agree we're not doing that yeah it's a I appreciate that feedback and you know again I can understand the frustration as were longer outages anyway thank you very much uh for coming here and thanks for answering uh you know discussing my questions thank you Mr Shirley Robin uh next mayor we're gonna have um Lisa Robinson Lisa if you can unmute yourself please hello um Lisa Robinson um I live on larksburg court um so a couple things first thank you for coming and and talking with us tonight um I want to speak first um piggyback on equipment um I I just want to make it known here too that um Colin hickey worked with me for probably four to five years to get uh a box replacement that was severely um I'm going to call it a Transformer box but I don't think that's right but equipment a box that was severely rusted had a lot of holes in it it was actually becoming a safety issue animals could get in it um children could put their hand in it it took almost five years to get a simple green box replaced um countless emails I think it probably would still be broken if Colin hadn't helped me um at the time though to be fair it was over covid so they did you know you guys said that it was problem to get um parts and everything through you know at Co you know that during that time which a lot of people had that problem um but I would think um knowing that you have some aging communities that a few replacement parts such as something this standard as a box would be kept on hand um it shouldn't take four years to get a piece of four to five years to get a piece of equipment something that simple um so what I see um and I'm not trying to beat you guys up I'm really sorry but I see more reactive than proactive with jcpnl um I know you have a scheduled maintenance for overhead lines of you know and other things I don't see that happening I'm gonna tell you I never see a jcpnl truck here just proactively looking around and checking equipment I know there's a schedule we've been told this many times this is like five years of meetings with jcpnl if not more um and things don't change now I know you have a plan um that you discussed before and I did miss the first few minutes so I apologize but I guess we've been having this conversation live we've had meetings we've I I just don't understand why it's taken four to five years for you now to come back and say okay here's now what we're going to do this should have been being worked on when we first started started communicating all of our issues all of these people who have been inconvenienced for years and and as Jerry Forte said we now have a reputation for having unreliable power grid in Bedminster and people don't want to buy homes here it's extremely unfair to the residents um the other thing is that I am actually also the ma uh the president of the hvma Master Association so I have to be concerned about our amenities this summer um we had a lot of problems with our pumps and our filters um at at the pools because of the power failures and the surges um they affect our they affect our filtration equipment every time one of those things happen the pool pumps go out for a while and it's very hard to get them reset we also have electronic gates for the homeowners to go in and out of and it affects the um affects the gates the gates will either not lock or they'll be stuck closed and we can't we can't get in so if it doesn't reset itself which a lot of times it hasn't we've had to make numerous calls this summer to the vendor to come out and look at our gates uh we've had to install surge protection um had somebody come in and do surge protection on all of our office equipment which was being affected um I can't prove it but I think that you know this dimming on and off in my in my condo with the lights between that and the power going on and off and flickering of the power it fried the the board in my refrigerator so I had to buy a new refrigerator last year um there's just been ongoing things and it's it's not fair to the residents um so I just I just wanted you to know that you know that these are affecting customers in many ways and also you know it's not fair when we have to close the pool because we don't have filters that aren't working the gates aren't working um and so that's affected you know the amenities as well so I just wanted to you know just put the those things out there just to reiterate how this is affecting us and we've been very patient with JC pnl for many many years but you know um patience is wearing very thin with a lot of people so I you know and again we're not going to get our community is only aging it's not getting younger so we would appreciate if you could take that into consideration and do more proactive work instead of just being reactive that's all I have to say thank you thank you Lisa okay next mayor we have um patty patty can you unmute yourself please hi um I'm Patty's husband my name is Frank cesta I'm on Mountain Court um brilliantly stated by Lisa Robinson um some of this is redundant but I've been sitting here listening and working hard on it so I'm going to let fly um with all due respect and I'm sure you all realize that all the technical jargon and fluff in your presentation and all the promises sound really cool but don't really mean much to lay people in Residence most only care uh about all the all too frequent inconvenient impact on our lives it clearly seems to most residents here that we have a significantly higher rate of outage occurrences than more heavily populated areas closer to the center of the antill if you will with larger infrastructures that we have like Central Middle sex and Union counties that have psng those areas also have squirrels traffic accidents Fallen trees Etc so it's hard to completely buy that reasoning I have many friends still living there and they all tell me that they hardly ever have an extended outage and certainly no record uh that matches our frequency so if it's a if it's primarily an infrastructure failure why did jcpnl uh take why didn't they take it upon themselves to proactively maintain the in infrastructure if that's possible and not allow it to deteriorate to its current dire condition isn't that responsibility incumbent on your company uh and lastly um do you know for a fact that all the calls from residents that reported rusted and compromised electric round boxes as Lisa mentioned uh as was requested uh by your young lady there in the last meeting was was that all definitely and diligently followed up on uh yes yes it was right Colin when after last meeting yeah as so I think he's referring to yant so yeah there was an inspection done at least my understanding last year of all equipment in the Hills I don't know the result of that in terms of what you guys determined in terms of what needed to be replaced that was not shared with us the boxing question was on Mountain Court in in Village Green that had said that was something we' asked for for years um I understand part of it was it was a Transformer and the problem was a supply chain deficiency but even after that kind of settled itself we still had a heck of a time just getting that one box replaced you've replaced a couple switches in the Hills over the last year as well but I don't know where it stands with respect to your inventory management and what things need to be replaced in addition to what's been done to date I just don't know I I just would call her working very closely with some of the um group associations the associations were were basically reaching out through me directly to her in some cases basically documenting places where there was significant Rush on the Transformers or in this case the the town committee identified a couple switches that were disrepair but they not aware of anything outstanding and and I don't know either because I know there was an inventory done and they inspected all the the boxes in the Hills okay probably last year but that was not shared with respect to what needed to be replaced and what was fine I don't know okay and as far as them like the two projects that we identified earlier that Sean went over those were done from his group so that was identified that was proactive it wasn't like after a meeting oh my gosh we better do something we're coming here telling you about solutions that his group identified Let's Make a Difference here let's improve the the customer experience so we are being proactive but we also are reactive when we get feedback and that's what our team is doing no no disrespect folks but I sense a genuinely sense um a strong degree of mismanagement here and it leaves me very concerned for the residents of Bedminster well I feel confident with with Shan in this position uh this is a a new position that he has and he has great team and he's challenging them to look at differents true thank you for my question great job thank you Robin May anyone else I have no other um raised hands at this time okay so it's bring impa town committee um any comments or questions a lot of this we have heard before a lot of this though is updated information and and I think the one thing that's true that drives everybody I always try to drive get the motivations and you can't dispute the notion that they have every incentive to make sure the lines are up and running at all times I mean that's what they're in the business to do is to provide power for a profit or whatever at the bpu's ability to let you have a profit but so I I I can't continually beat up the messenger who all everyone's trying to work towards the same goal here and that is to get consistent good power source um I personally I'm on the pack line I believe because I I'm up in that direction but you know my lights flicker as well it it just it happens I have noticed a a big time improvement from when I first moved in to now is it perfect no do I feel like I've got more power outages than when I had when I was a kid yeah um but um I don't believe for one second you guys are sitting back in Corporate Center and saying let's figure a way to turn the lights out I so what do we do with that everybody's fighting for it to get to the same spot and I get that the residents are frustrated but I I just can't I I don't know what the answers are other than to see the money we in and the projects come in and see the improvements um I'm not hearing uh jcpnl say you know yeah we're aware of your problems we're just ignoring them they're aware of what's going on they're trying to fix them and the residents are going to continue to let us know when they're not getting service and this will probably continue but I think it's a good thing I mean getting you here and listening it's not just us saying it it's the residents you see we've got a robust turnout um I think they're all appreciative that you're here you see what they they actually have these concerns they're not making it up um thank you for coming out and continue to do your hard work and we hope that we get improved performance I mean what more can you say thanks to the residents for coming out and voicing their displeasure and their experiences and and and backing us so when we say hey folks come out we've got problems you see we're not just saying this we're not being you know fearmongers this is real this is an issue that Colin and and primarily Colin but you know the TC has been handling for a while so thank you we we do hear it all obviously we get phone calls from the residents we see Facebook posts we are very familiar with a lot of the problems and the issues so if there's information that we can provide to you with respect to questions you might have after the discussions tonight questions issues of residents have raised we're here we're ready to provide that because we want to get this problem solved just as Doug said it sounds like you guys have a plan in place to be able to start to address this but it has been I mean it's it's not just ones and TW this has been persistent for years now and it and I think you open with you know it was kind of got better for a while and then it's really got worse and the concern obviously we have is you know we look at the need for infrastructure Investments both of the substation level as well as the local level the neighborhood level and the concern we have is as mayor mentioned this those neighborhoods are aging so those Investments need to be made because it's not going to get any better without that well it's it's not just that the infrastructure is aging but also as the federal government seems to be putting greater emphasis on electric on electricity uh for for replacing heat and for every other it's going to put more pressure more stress on an already stressed situation right and um it requires infrastructure uh investment to keep up and not just keep up but to anticipate what's coming down doesn't that mean you just go and you buy another like power strip and you just plug that into keep going and then you have a whole take one of those really thin lines and get and keep tying them together daisy chain from this s Lisa Robinson has her hand raised online yeah I'm sorry just one final thing um is there any way that we can get like um updates or a check-in maybe in six months to see where you are with this just so that we are all up to date with the progress um I just don't want to you know leave here tonight um and then we don't hear anything we we we really do need updates as to where things are is there a way that we can we're gon to address that at at the end of this uh presentation okay thank you so Renee Gina just real quick um I do live in the Hills right now and I think our unit was built in 1985 and you can see like just through the whole neighborhood that stuff is a and it it is a little scary but it's it's with all the utilities it's not just the electric but we don't have gas so everything we do is electric and we're all working from home right now so when the thing flickers and my my uh laptop goes out I now have to reconnect back to my vpm blah blah blah and it's a pain in the neck and I know a lot of our neighbors they get a power out it comes back power out it comes back and that's that's problem especially if you're zooming or teaming it's unprofessional and it's just not right for for your work but that's why I mentioned when the um can we do um more investigation of the older equipment because we know it's going to go we've already had it in some of the neighborhoods so if there's a way of doing more frequent inspections and I know you're trying to explain how you guys do it um but if there's a way to do it and perhaps if there's a way to get some of those funds that are sitting at the BPU um get them earmarked for Replacements of our of our local lines because if you guys do all this work at the power substation levels but our lines to our house don't work it won't matter what you do out in the substations it's not going to get in our house but that's my two cents but and thank you for being here we really appreciate all the stuff that you're doing appreciate yeah I agreed thank you I I think the presentation was very informative but um I just feel like like it's very redundant and you were like you were saying 2024 was one of the worst years it's like it's not getting better it's getting worse in the way of the world today people work from home it's very inconvenient for our residents and you know that you hear what everyone's saying um it's not just about you know um you know people are are annoyed or aggravated it's it's affecting their daily lives and so um we were just asking uh you know to maybe look at into things a little bit further so that um we can make the improvements necessary so it doesn't continue to get worse and worse because it is 2024 I'm sure there's technological advances that have taken place in and Equipment even though it's mechanical I'm sure there's technology behind it that you know can can make improvements but thank you for coming and and thank you to all the residents for coming and and really just voicing I think it's it's great to see how many people are are affected and also um that care you know so it makes it like real human aspect to it so one of the things that we start off with um is you know thaning the Chas of HL reps um for those who don't know Bob is actually Bob Flynn is actually standing in as as an intrum right you're intrm leis on so so lucky you you get to inherit Bedminster on on this temporary basis um Jackie is is are we getting a permanent yes um we be doing that with in the process of uh making that moving in the hiring so Bob Bob's been great Bob's been dealing with me and with col on weekends middle of the night um but we understand that he also has another service area that that you know he supports as well um so we'd love to have him because of his responsiveness Colin question that had a day off let's see 11 weekends 11 and he picks up the phone at 6:30 in the morning on Saturday and I will vouch for that yep and and I will vouch for those calls later that Saturday yes um but you know Bob you did mention the loop presentation and is that something that you can bring back um is that a self-explanatory presentation so I mentioned that oh that was you oh I'm sorry and no I just don't want to you know cu probably say anything um I I can work on something I mean it's probably a very engineering uh based uh presentation but I think I recall when we were we were out there doing like uh some showand tell about some looping in circuit ofus stuff I think one of my colleagues I think she created really good illustration see I can't take that out of work we had a very high level presentation it's worth noting I mean it's it's the stuff that's really like that's like the the the bread and butter that's going to like really kind of help things well and I think you know what you heard from some not all but from some of um uh the residents asking questions or giving comments is how is this going to work exactly is it quantif is there a quantifiable Improvement and the answer may be no it's not quantifiable but at least if it's demonstrable that it's been shown this is how it works it's simple it's simple engineering simple physics that's something that we can take back yeah yeah and and you don't even for that you may not even have to come in person you can do it remotely and just participate and do the presentation um through through Zoom okay on even though Bob lives uh only a few minutes left come on I had to and um to a question that that Lisa had and which I was going to get to is um when we've had these presentations this is not you know the the end all right so this is I want to say this is a new beginning um because we certainly don't see it that way um but there are right so there's commitment for the pack substation there's commitment for the greater Crossroads substation both of which you anticipate will be complete by October by the end of the year oh by the end of the year it did say October presid it did on yeah October um so how do we continue this right so do we schedule for you guys to come back to the TC I will as those projects complete I will probably come back with the individual who will be the full-time rep to do a hey here's an update and then also here's the individual and then we'll have some hopefully as you you put it perfectly it's I mean we we have that one high priority s we're doing the press release is very well written so that a regular resident can understand it it's not like we're upgrading threee phase to two-phase so we can you know do this that that like it's in layman's terms enough that like all right I see this is going to benefit us so we'll do the same when we have these two projects as they Complete because they also the other thing is they they are you know at least the one is the substation project that benefits not just this municipality but surrounding as well um so it's it's tied in it's a big project so I I would say like none of these are really what I would regard the substation project these are all just those we just identify those circuits by the substation that's all work being done on the lines we're not doing anything I think understood yeah I think we asked a question before about whether a substation or line we're just identifying them by the substation but it's line it's Line work that we're doing and you know that's the first thing and the second thing is you know as we put pen and paper with these Solutions creating these Loops I do ask for a little bit of time um I know we have listened to a bunch of residents that said you know we've been talking about this for a long time we've been doing you know a lot of different studies you know there's been you know certain things that you know have plagued us over the last few years um and so what I'm asking for is just a little bit of time in that time as we complete these two other projects we talked about the spend that will conclude this year what I recommend is you know whenever you get with this team again maybe we can give an engineering update on some of our attainable solutions that we talked about such as those Loops that we can give you the update on where we're at where we'll put those Loops where you'll see those great shiny boxes up in the up on on the sticks and hopefully AO kind of benefits that provide you guys a little bit more SE that mean you coming back I mean they yeah they he just livs off to 78 this is clest I think that I think that's yes I'm not too far from like Frenchtown area so like I I live what we call the r district and you know um and I'll just tell you know I just tell tell you guys you know I've heard a lot of frustration in the voices of the you know your towns folk today and I can appreciate it you know I I also live in a you know a high priority circuit you know my my power does go out from time to time more than I'd like to admit and again as jcpnl continues to you know address a lot of these circuit you know one of the reasons and it's not excuse but one of the reasons why it does take time to do that is that you know we we cover like what was it like 44% of the state something like that I mean we have you know it's similar type reliability issues you know in many different pockets for various different amount of reasons uh and so we get it we hear the frustration and we we can appreciate it you know we're hopefully going to be making some changes here and that's just not with your Township but it's j JP know in a whole you know that infrastructure Improvement plan that we filed that $931 million is a lot and that's capital that we're going to be putting up front to to get the work done I mean we're we're we're waiting and ready to make that commitment but there's rules and regulations around those kind of improvement plans and that's we appreciate your support with that because you know that we we there's a customer experience Improvement that needs to happen and you know it's going to happen it's just a matter of a little bit of time so we'll continue to update you guys and I think the only thing out of tonight's presentation or at least the feedback that I got from the customers is the power quality issues like all this flickering light all those things like because there's not really much on our system other than like voltage complaints that that people have talked to us about but again some of the benefits I get from coming to these meetings is is I I hear that firsthand I get to put some you know some you know what I'm hearing to the system what makes sense what could possibly be Solutions and many times hopefully it's like oh there's a simple solution or there's a seasonal cap not a not a bar control cap or something like that that we can we could change and you know because flickering lights I don't know it's I don't know why that would be caused you know there's variety of reasons we've dealt with flickering lights in the past or or unregulated or or regulated voltage that are have regulated voltage issues you know so things that we need to learn about and address and those again should also be corrected that's not like a systematic problem you right because if it was everyone in town would see this this this issue so we're going to have to dial in on some of these locations and he's going to be a all I thinking about this this the kind of stuff that like like my house is totally nerded out with like you know voltage equipment measuring every little thing you know it's so I get it I I'm with you guys and you know again I just I just need a little more time we want to you know I have a great team one of my Engineers is you know uh giberto he's been on the call he's he's listening in on this um because he was the reliability engineer for this area for a while um and he's listening in because again he's he's been with you guys for a few years now um and he's been messaging us on the side so he he's been taking some notes seriously yeah he does he's a great team he's been taking some notes and so we we we've been working with I think bisan is he on your team mazan is also on my team yes so he's familiar with some of the voltage irregularities as well around town I had a long conver couple couple hour conversation with M this week so yeah we're we're fully aware and and Gil is kind of filled in for M and of maz's areas mazan actually moved into our planning and Analysis group in the same for Flemington and the Washington districts uh Gil has been U the reliab engineer for Summit and you're he's Flemington now yeah so Gil does a great job as well so yeah great team so we'll be looking at this stuff but I definitely appreciate all the feedback today Chie Sean Bob thank you so much for coming out and we look forward to continued discussions and with hopefully positive results so thank you uh it is 9:30 we still have the whole rest of so we're gonna adjourn for five minutes we will be returning so five minutes speak for your Gordon you don't have to leave there's a whole rest of the meeting ahead of you can't wait for the rest of all right so we'll at 9:30 we'll adjourn good sure okay it is 9:40 we are back in session from the jcpnl presentation move on with the rest of meetings we don't have an approval of uh minutes uh we'll have those at our next meeting uh permits and Raffles one two three four five six six permits and Raffles social Fair permit for international long shoreman's Association local 12:35 September 24 from 900 a.m. to 10: p.m. at Fiddler's Elbow a social Fair permit for the friends of the clearance Dylan library on October 13 2024 from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. to clearance still in public library on premise 5050 raffle to benefit Friends of the shelter Inc on October 24th 2024 at 10:30 to 300 p.m. 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Hamilton Farm golf club and on premise merchandise raffle to benefit friends at the shelter Inc on October 24 10:30 a.m. to 3:00 pm. located at Hamilton Farm Golf Club an on premise merchandise raffle to benefit American Cancer Society Inc on October 14 2024 at 9:00 a.m. to 300 p.m. located at Hamilton Farm golf club and an premise merchandise raffle to benefit Cedar Hill school PTO on October 24 at 5:30 am imagine that's pm to 9:30 p.m located at Burnt Mill cider any questions or comments regarding those permits and Raffles seeing none take a motion to approve so moved St hi Mr hicke sorry all in favor I'm sorry something had changed monthly report discussion by subcommittee chair committ Stevenson thank you mayor good evening everybody uh for DPW just report back on a couple of the things we have going on uh Jason and his team have installed the signs for the parking at the library um working out at jbh got the some missiones with the septic system out there we had that pumped we've got some lines we've got to look at uh got some of the missing um fences and railing on the hike and bike over near AT&T we got that up and running and as far as gas meter projects the one here at Town Hall is going to be completed on Thursday and the line up in Old Stonehouse looks like that's put done we just have to tap into the highway so hopefully that's going to be done in real time next couple days what we got great so Jason just following up on what Doug said so um this week generator is Thursday or Friday they should have it hooked up then we just GNA have to get it ran by full so so this building now we need a storm we just need a storm right stop did you not just hear the last two hours we have a generator so now it'll never go out again all right insurance thank you Doug thank you Jason about too uh there is a little delay with it because I guess a lot more residents signed on eight nine I think nine more signed on funny how that happens funny how that happens ski hill has up listened to neighborhood and Old Stone House uh much more uh if you build it they will come right if you build it they will tap got right up to the deadline where they sign up actually when they were coming around with that I think it was 10 years was it Gina they said for 10 years you can anybody who pays to run the main line if you will there's a period of time I believe it's 10 years that the 10 year buyback on the TAPS in you will see the money come back yep well that's that's good news it's certainly good news to see more people signed up for it um thank you Doug commit in hickey than mayor good evening all uh Library you and I have a meeting on Wednesday mayor just want to mention that the story walk around the community Garden is open for parents and their young readers so check it out kind of an experimental it's an experiential thing you go around the garden you stop at certain stations you do a little reading so apparently it's got a lot of good feedback but we'll hear more on Wednesday Board of Health we have a meeting on Thursday and the Board of Ed I attended the meeting last Thursday uh Miss G expressed her sincer appreciation for all the sport the School receives from the town special call out to Jason and DPW for getting School ready for the new school year as well as to PD apparently there was an inadvertent triggering of the security system last week and PD responded and quote the response was immediate professional and comforting it was just an inadvertent trigger a little human error but uh PD was right on the case so she wanted to give her many thanks for you guys for that a nice assembly of adjectives there that's great that's a really good that's that's Miss G that's not me that's great thank you rette thank you mayor thank you everybody for coming tonight um I have a JB meet jbh meeting on Wednesday so I'll report after that um EC it's a little quiet but they did have um someone from the farmers market one of the attendees come up to Laura who's one of the um Lees from EC to the farmers market um come up and ask her about doing a special project on invasive species they're very interested in forming a group and going around the town and especially like on the hike and bike area getting rid of some of the invasive species so EC is going to look into uh organizing something with that okay that's all I got okay okay B Fest is coming up yes that's I'm gonna keep it short and so I'm only going to report on Fall Fest nothing else none of the programs or anything because um we have a wck meeting tomorrow so I'll have that a better update next week but uh fall frest PR preparation is underway it'll be held on Saturday October 12th from 1200 to 5:00 at River Park and there's a rain date of October 13th um activities include Inflatables Harvest maze petting zoo pony rides tracklist train hay rides golf simulator trailer that's pretty cool uh pet show Emergency Services demo operating the DPW loader which is a popular one balloon twister face painter and more um we're going to be sing out an invite link to the Bedminster employees commissions and committees for volunteers for the event and currently we have 28 businesses and organizations signed up to be exhibitors and we also have about 15 sponsors that's great thank you so once again um thank you to the rec committee and T M Bono for all the work you guys are putting into uh continuing to keep Bal Fest better and better every year uh from my perspective uh L's board um no meetings didn't have one earlier in the month and don't have one um till October right and even that may be in question um Library board meeting you didn't mention that we have one coming up um Farmers Market we will be scheduling a farmers market committee meeting uh this past week uh broke a thousand U attendees again uh which I thought was crazy um but folks keep coming out so that was really great to see um a advisory so we had a meeting last week a Advisory Board and um nothing I can't give any specifics but a project that I've been working on I think since late winter early maybe early spring um we expect uh to be in a position maybe at our next meeting to talk about uh preservation of a very notable Farm um on lington Road um we'll give a little more detail about that when it comes up at it's about roughly about 60 Acres or so uh to be preserved um and a viewshed also preserved that's very important to uh folks in town so that's great to see and also the ACT advisory there is a um endorsement for pursuing looking at a another um preservation uh almost about a little over 100 acres maybe between 100 120 Acres depending upon how the exception are is um furthered and that memo is gone back and we'll be um Beth Davidson from New Jersey conservation foundation will continue those efforts and work with the homeowners uh to continue that process and at some point hopefully we can uh bring it to public and let's see uh that's we going to present it this time M Ray please have the administrator's report uh yes mayor I've just been working with new jerse American water on the new repeater shed agreement um which actually expired in 2019 there's been a lot of lag time in between Communications but we're on the right paack now um we've already had our Municipal attorney review the contract presented and the risk manager so um we should be moving forward relatively quickly um Miller Lane Pump Station project we have a joint stab and Sewer utility meeting next Wednesday September 25th at 6 o'clock to review the project say with our engineer um roof project we are we've had a couple project team meetings we are pushing back our um bid um until uh October SL November um a little bit of a going back and forth with con construction and um engineering on that project um B Fest project team meetings continue we have one tomorrow and uh just a couple reminders important election information on September 21st is when all the mail and bouts start going out so our Dropbox outside front of the building will be opened on Friday October 26 to November 3rd is early inperson voting um there's H six locations throughout the county that people can vote through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. and Sundays from 10:00 a.m. to 6: and October 29th is the deadline to apply for a vote by mail ballot and um lastly November 4th is the deadline to apply for a vote by mail ballot in person this my report okay thank you lieutenant poo um anything you want to report on community placing sure we had a coffee with a cop that was very well received down at Potterville at the Black River Deli think we need to thank Bernie for supplying coffee and muffins and that was run with con Junction with Tober PD we have another call you would a cop scheduled for September 28th at the bed Farmers Market starting October 7th I'll start our essential needs fund drive for veterans that'll be hitting the website our Facebook page on Friday great and Fall Fest you guys are going to be all over that's just community policing right my cotton candy machine just came in C candy with the cop I like that brought some tonight should made ay snack sugar that's just that's great that is great um you know I do want to come back to something that um I think we raised at the last meeting um so over the weekend I did have the opportunity to talk with uh Congressman Kane about um about where we said on his legislation to provide a funding mechanism for the local agencies um who provide security assets at the request of the Secret Service um and then over the weekend on yesterday we had the uh the incident down in Florida at one of the Trump Golf Courses and I can only imagine that is certainly going to lead to uh additional requests I I don't know this to be the case but that I certainly can't imagine additional requests coming from the Secret Service directed at the prosecutor's office and Bedminster to provide additional support especially around the perimeter of the uh the golf course um this morning I sent an email to uh Senator Booker's office um asking for uh Senator Booker Booker to sponsor or to serve as the Senate sponsor for Congressman ke's legislation I reached out to the um the woman from uh Congressman Booker Senator Booker's office who was um who attended our meeting here uh a little over two weeks ago um and waiting on a response once again between State Police prosecutor's office and Bedminster we're talking a fair amount of money um it's only going to be more and you know I think what we talked about um previously was you know given assassination t one assass assassination 102 uh sacred service calls in Knox on the door to the prosecutor's office and the Bedminster PD asking for local support you have to respond um but there should be a mechanism to make sure that all the local resources including the State State Police prosecutor's office and Bedminster that we are reimbursed for supporting the federal government um at thhs on those requests um so I will continue to update this as uh wear back from both c b her's office as well as Congressman we have no ordinances to introduce tonight and uh we' have no public hearing of ordinance we have one item on The Descent agenda uh anyone wants to pull that up for individual consideration take a motion to approve resolution number 2024 124 on the consent agenda so moved second roll call vote Please Mr Stevenson I Mr py hi Miss moresi hi Miss Fernandez hi and mayor Jacobs hi thank you we do one resolution for individual consideration this is resolution 20241 122 this resolution authorizes the inclusion of Bedminster Township in the federal Highlands fact Miss is sure I'll give you a little explanation in 2022 Congress reauthorized the um Highlands conservation act and created a process for municipalities to um be added to the region and um Bedminster is within that expanded region and this uh by authorizing uh Bedminster to be included in the federal Highlands boundary it opens us up to some additional funding through the US uh fish and wildlife um most most of the grants are cash match grants that require 50% but it provides an additional funding sources for the toship right and so what this uh it's important to know what it does but it's also important to know what it doesn't do it doesn't um mean that we are uh opting into the preservation restrictions under the state Highlands act this is merely just saying yes we that we are in the federal um Island boundary and therefore opens up grant opportunities for it because there's no harm um or constraints on our property owners uh or us any questions or comments no I just was going to thank you because that was one comment I thought was okay what is this is this sort of like you know the state says gotcha you now you're in the highlands and you're in the preservation or the planning or whatever it is so thank you for clarifying yeah so so you're still um you'll get to expand your um septic system if Bo of help allow so I got that going you got that so if there's no further questions or comments take a motion to approve so second well call vote again please Mr Stevenson hi Mr hickey hi Miss moresi hi Miss Fernandez hi and mayor Jacobs hi thank you I think we've already signed off on the bill list I will take a motion to approve the bill list pending review of individual invoices so moved second roll call vote again please Mr Stevenson I Mr hickey hi Miss moresi hi Miss bernandez hi and mayor Jacobs hi thank you any member of the township committee have anything they want to put up for discussion under new business s none will'll go to Old business utilities right there first and foremost you want to discuss more utility good we have no updates okay thank you uh pluckin Park Housing John Doug anything you can discuss publicly or no I conducted an inperson site INSP only that okay moving on Somerset Hills Public Safety Committee um we had a uh Zoom conference last week with mayor of Bernardsville mayor of Bernard's Township mayor Pete pack Gladstone mayor of Far Hills and the mayor of Bridgewater and me um and also Chief Bernardo and Chief carolus from um bar Hills attended as well uh we talked about where we all stood on lprs um Tom I did give an indication to the other mayors that Bedminster is moving forward on purchase of five L license plate readers um not sure I know you working with uh James on wrapping up the contract not sure I think my uh now it's with you my partner John sininsky reviewed that got back comments he did yes and we've pass those on to the vendor you know I asked Tom the question and I got two other people so is the anticipation uh that maybe at the next meeting we'll be in position to uh move forward with the resolution we've given our comment so I think your walls of report you want to ask for that I just say on our end we have two the approval letters the county is two other locations that shouldn't be a problem the hills Master Association is having their meeting the end the so that's really the last one we waiting for okay for our site plan approvals okay so hopefully um hopefully we're there okay good um one of the other things that um I discussed at the Somerset Hills Public Safety Committee meeting was um the Cannabis machine that was identified or not identified that was found at a uh gas station and none of the other towns were aware of um that situation so I prized them all and asked them you know if they've all similarly have opted out of uh allowing dispensaries in their municipalities um and Tommy just want want to give a description of what this unit was It was a essentially a cigarette type vending machine but in the 21st century like an iPad screen and you had a a scanner for your driver's license to show us you're over 21 and then you have a credit card input and then you pick what you want uh there was six options and it would long as you were over 21 and your credit card didn't get confined you could get your marijuana joint your gummies crazy and um so uh Mr PD did reach out to the um suers count prosecutor's office which said hey it's legal we think this is a zoning issue um and since we uh it's not not allowed under zoning yeah it's not allowed under zoning laws the uh owner of the gas station was uh notified who promptly um arranged for its U removal which the owner of the machine um took care of uh but I think it does rais a question of um and I raised this to the Somers Hills Public Safety Committee to the other Mayors is I don't even know that that is legal because when you are my understanding is that when a dispensary is licensed it's licensed at a particular location and there are requirements for security and other elements that go with a dispensary and also a dispensary comes with a license that costs a fair amount of money so I'm a little suspect and I I don't know that it's right well that I'm legally right but it just seems suspect it just seems suspect that you can just throw up a marijuana dispensary dispensing machine vending machine it's a vending machine their entire gas station marijuana machine there you go but it's it's just you know if it's we're seeing at that one location I'm sure it's just a matter of time before we see it elsewhere and I just want to make sure the Mayors were aware of that situation and um so noted so that was um we'll uh we'll leave that off with the with that old business um we'll go into Township committee comments we do have two resolutions to consider when we return from executive session so we'll run through Township committee comments we'll adjourn to Executive session then we will return to the public session for consideration of those two resolutions so Robin do you want us to uh go to the other room or should we stay here well I mean if we're gonna go ahead and pause the meeting we have I can We're not gonna do it just yet I just ch chat room um Amanda is gonna stay with us but Steve Susan and Katherine don't need to I can move us into a separate room okay so will physically please stay here move into a chat room we'll ask the three of you just to head out but not yet Township committee comments I can't leave now and take care of him handcuffs so let's go through Township committee comments mman Stevenson thanks mayor uh no comes mman hick uh May thank you just want to thank our residents uh you know one of the jobs up here is to amplify the concerns of our residents but you got to show up and they showed up tonight they showed up in person thank you both for staying till the end they showed up online you know had JC pnl showed up and there were two people here they've been like H I'm not going to really pay attention to this folks showed up we're here to amplify your voices but you got to participate thank you to our residents for participating that's all I have Mar thank you thank you committee women moresi I just like to it reiterate what Colin said it's great when our neighbors come out um I just hope that we can have a meeting with this many people for something wonderful and not something that's a problem that's all I got okay committee woman Fernandez no comments okay and I have no further comments so at 10:06 I'll take a motion to adjourn to Executive sessions Z moved second all in favor thank you good night thank you Gordon coming again now you can go okay it is 1053 Township committee is back from executive session and we do have we have one resolution or do we have two well you have one resolution just one right just one the second you opted yeah so so we have one resolution to consider which is resolution number 2024 123 this resolution authorizes the extension for the ration period of Officer Joshua bz questions or comments from the township committee seeing none take a motion to approve resolution 2024 two3 so move second uh roll call vote please uh Mr Stevenson hi Mr hickey hi Miss moresi hi Miss fernandz hi and mayor Jacobs hi thank you that's the only resolution that we are going to take action following our executive session so at 10:54 I'll take a motion to adjourn move second all in favor you good night they were up 15 to n which means they're going to lose 16 16 to 15 Falcons I'm I'm I'm a