Summer’s back, and with it the power outages that have vexed our community for years.  So far this month alone there have been several power interruptions, including at least two significant outages, the most recent one occurring yesterday afternoon that lasted several hours and that ComEd was reportedly blaming on some problem in Evanston.

What’s our Mayor, Howard “Let’s Make A Deal” Frimark, doing to alleviate this problem? 

After large portions of Park Ridge lost power for as much as four days last August, Frimark made a grand gesture of bringing in ComEd public relations people to explain why we continue to have regular outages and what it was doing to alleviate them.  The report from residents who attended those meetings: “Same stuff, different day.”

As part of those Frimark-orchestrated dog-and-pony shows, ComEd admitted to 268 power interruptions in 2007, most of which were “miscellaneous equipment malfunctions, fallen trees and branches, and weather — primarily lightning and wind.”  ComEd’s p.r. folks promised a variety of actions to remedy the problem.  Consequently, back in April we asked what Frimark and City staff were doing to make sure ComEd was making good on its promises. (“Still Powerless In Park Ridge,” April 23, 2008)  The silence from City Hall has been deafening.

We also suggested that maybe Frimark should consider following the lead of the Village of Deerfield, which in April sued ComEd for bad service as reflected in 223 service interruptions last year.  Again, not a sound from Frimark, who’s idea of acting “mayoral” runs more toward posing for ribbon-cutting photos, planning events like Taste of Park Ridge, and arranging sweetheart deals for his friends and campaign contributors.

Since we reported on the Deerfield suit, we have discovered that Hinsdale is considering such a suit; and that the City of Darien sued ComEd in 2005, also because of poor service.  The Darien suit prompted a settlement that caused ComEd to spend $3.4 million to repair more than 14,000 feet of cable and other aging technology.  As a result, outages are down almost 50% since 2005, to a rate of 1.38 outages per resident per year – compared to ComEd’s system-wide average of 1.57 outages.  

We’re not necessarily suggesting that a lawsuit is the only way to get ComEd to provide us with dependable power,  but we haven’t seen much in the way of results from anything else the City has done so far.  And if suing ComEd is what it will take to get a few million dollars in repairs and improvements to our power grid, we think that’s definitely worth a lot more consideration than our mayor and City Council have given it.

But that will require Mr. Frimark to start acting like a real mayor.