You are a township badly strapped for cash and you find out that you can reduce the cost of street lighting from $6.81 to 88 cents per street light. Then you find out that you can get a federal grant for $450,000 to pay for the conversion. A win-win situation. Then the you-know-what hits the fan.
JCP&L, an Ohio-based company, refuses to give their blessing even though they are mandated to reduce their carbon footprint and increase energy efficiency by 22 percent by 2020 as required by the Global Warming Response Act of 2007.
Such is the situation in Jackson, which in mid-2009 applied for a federal grant to install LED lighting on the town’s light poles that are owned by JCP&L. Jackson received the grant and anticipated a savings of $5.93 per pole per month.
If they converted all 5,000, their annual savings, which would be passed on to the taxpayers, would be $355,800. With the grant in place, JCP&Lwas notified and they just plain ignored the request. Even the Board of Public Utilities, which applauded the town’s initiative, could not order JCP&L to cooperate.
Finally, after more than a year of haggling, JCP&L is at least talking to us, but making ridiculous demands such as including a two-hour transportation charge per pole even if they are doing multiple poles on the same street, and then they are charging a multiple-hour labor charge even though installation should take no more than two minutes per unit, according to the manufacturer.
And the bottom line is, if Jackson does not use the grant in the very near future, they will lose it.
Gary L. Moliver Jackson