By Nathan Duke
The task force, which included Assembly members Gianaris, Catherine Nolan (D-Ridgewood) and Margaret Markey (D-Maspeth), recommended that the utility spend $20 million to develop an upgraded electrical grid in Long Island City.The report also said the state should review Con Ed's monopoly of western Queens' electrical distribution system every 10 years, force Con Ed to reimburse businesses for damaged equipment and connect liability provisions to the duration of outages.”There are two avenues we are pursuing to make sure our recommendations are enacted,” said Assemblyman Michael Gianaris (D-Astoria), who led the task force. “We've submitted the report as comment to the PSC [Public Service Commission] as part of their ongoing proceedings, but we will also put together a legislative package which will try to codify a lot of the recommendations into law.”The state Public Service Commission intends to review the task force's report, but could not comment yet, a PSC spokesman said. “As we have stated previously, our performance during the events in northwest Queens last summer was not up to the standards our customers have come to expect, nor did it meet the expectations we have set for ourselves,”Con Ed said in a statement. “We are learning from this episode and are implementing many infrastructure improvements and new emergency response procedures.”The task force criticized Con Ed in its report for not implementing recommendations made by the state attorney general's office following a 1999 blackout in Washington Heights. The report also contended the utility was not prepared to handle last summer's outage, operated an aging and poorly maintained western Queens electrical system and erred by not shutting down the entire network as the feeder system began to fail during the blackout. The task force found that the utility's heavy reliance on phone calls to determine the number of affected residents was inadequate and that Con Ed was not forthcoming about the number of people who lost power. The report also slammed the utility for refusing to reimburse any business for more than $7,000, arguing that many businesses lost hundreds of thousands of dollars or were forced to close permanently because of the blackout.The report follows on the heels of the PSC's study of the blackout which was released Jan. 18 and Con Ed's own report in October, which blamed the outage on short-circuited cables, a substation circuit breaker malfunction and a surge as utility workers tried to restore power. The PSC's report found that an estimated 174,000 people were affected by the outage.Gianaris said part of Con Ed's failure during the outage resulted from a lack of state oversight. The report found that when former Gov. George Pataki took office, the PSC had 800 staff members. Today, it employs around 550 people, of whom 40 percent are age 55 or older, making them soon eligible for retirement, the report found. “We want the PSC to go back to traditional, more aggressive oversight,” Gianaris said. He said the PSC reviews Con Ed every five years, but the task force recommended annual reviews. In addition, the report recommended creating competition for electrical distribution in the region and called for Con Ed to spend $20 million to create a new state-of-the-art Queens grid.
