Jones Lane Residents Question Pepco Representatives On Reliability Plans, Customer Service

Residents of the Jones Lane neighborhood had their turn to share their Pepco grievances at a .

Organized by of District 39, the meeting allowed residents to question Pepco Public Information Officer Charles Washington as well as two Pepco engineers, Steve Atkinson and Mike Brown. ().

While the Pepco representatives attempted to recount the problems that caused outages in the , residents were quick to remind them that power outage problems have persisted in the area for nearly thirty years.

“I remember the time when I would have the blow dryer on and didn’t have electricity,” said one resident in attendance. “That was 1979 and that’s how far back this goes. We’re not trying to be nasty with you, but I am so frustrated...Go back to 1979 and see what’s wrong with our neighborhood.”

Looking out at the in the room, Washington began the meeting with an apology.

“What we’re seeing here is there is room for improvement,” Washington said. “Pepco believes we owe you an apology. We have not been as aggressive about tree trimming as we should have been. We are going to own up to it.”

In light of recent problems, he said Pepco has invested a quarter of a billion dollars in a six-point Reliability Enhancement Plan to work towards fixing the problems.

The plan includes tree trimming, investigation of priority feeders and underground cable replacement. A progress report published in December detailed what has been done so far. Though Pepco has trimmed trees along 939 miles of powerlines and evaluated and upgraded feeders in Gaithersburg and Germantown, little has been done to fix the Jones Lane area problems specificially.

Steve Atkinson, a manager of infrastructure at Pepco, said this is because the Jones Lane area power comes from a branch of the main feeder. So far upgrades have focused on priority feeders, which supply power for more than 1,000 houses.

But some residents, an apology and explanation was not sufficient.

"All of us in this room had 10 days, 20 days, 30 days in 2010 that we lost electricity. Are you going to reimburse us for all the food we lost, for one of my neighbors who lost her TV set?" said one resident.

That sentiment was echoed later by another in the room. "From a public affairs standpoint - what you can do for us now is to give us a $200 credit on our power bill," another resident said. "Why not try to show us that you care immediately?"

Washington directed residents to the claims section on the website.

Several people complained about Pepco customer service and the difficulty in getting through to an operator when there are outages. In fact, even Delegate Reznik said his wife could not get through to Pepco to report power outages at their house.

Washington said it is important for people to report when power goes out as that is the only way Pepco stays up to date on outages.

Residents shared their addresses with Pepco and Washington said he promised to follow up on problems in each area.

"We're going to follow up on each of these items," Washington said.