A.G. Gancarski
Despite a contentious meeting between JEA CEO Paul McElroy and the Jacksonville City Council Tuesday evening, odds are good council members will continue their complaints regarding the slow pace of power restoration on Wednesday and perhaps beyond.
The JEA Outage Map shows 23,914 JEA customers are still without power as of 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, almost five days after the first outages.
After the storm on Friday, JEA established two sets of generic estimated restoration times for power outages. One of them was Sunday; the other was Tuesday at 4 p.m.
A decision was made late Sunday to promise, fatefully as it turned out, that power would be restored citywide Monday evening.
That clearly didn’t happen.
Despite crews assisting from throughout the state, the southeastern portion of the U.S., and even as far away as Missouri, the pace of power restoration has slowed this week, as exhausted line workers deal with the toughest problems affecting smaller groups of people in residential and rural areas.
Tuesday in the council chambers, CEO McElroy bluntly said “we blew it,” as council members blasted him for setting unrealistic expectations.
Meanwhile: the big news coming out of the council meeting wasn’t slow restoration, but the hard costs of the process, which McElroy estimated could reach $30 million for the independent authority that runs the city’s municipal utility.
The City of Jacksonville, meanwhile, estimated in the same meeting that costs of getting Jacksonville back to where it was before the storm could be as high as $100 million.
Jacksonville will have some resources at its disposal.
The city has an emergency reserve of $52.7 million, and much of that money can be used to get projects going.
Many of those projects, for both JEA and the city, will qualify for federal and state reimbursement.
As well, borrowing is an option for the city and the utility both.
The mayor’s office has touted improved perception from bond ratings agencies as recently as Oct. 3, with a press release asserting passing the pension tax referendum led Moody’s called the mayor’s victory a “credit positive,” adding it “represents a positive step related to Jacksonville’s most significant credit challenge.”
JEA’s own credit rating has never been better, meanwhile.
In April, the utility got its first AAA rating of all time.
