Cleveland's utilities committee is looking for answers after a series of Cleveland Public Power outages over the past month.
Recent power failures in Cleveland's Old Brooklyn neighborhood, and in other locations throughout the city, have some residents turning to social media to complain about CPP service and reliability.
Cleveland Councilman Michael Polensek told News 5 the city utilities committee is now requesting a list of all anticipated capital projects over the next five years, to get a snapshot of how Cleveland Public Power will improve its aging infrastructure.
"What are they doing to maintain this utility for our city residents?" asked Polensek. "I've received calls from CPP employees who are telling me, hey we've got concerns about the maintenance of the W. 41 Street facility, and how it impacts the whole west side."
Cleveland west side community leader Henry Senyak pointed to aging wiring in his neighborhood, which he believes has now lost a significant amount of its insulation.
"These wires are arcing, and instead of blowing the fuses, like they should, they're actually going and blowing the transformers," Senyak said. "I hope CPP has a plan, because they certainly are charging enough for their services in surcharges. So you would think they would start reinvesting in their infrastructure."
News 5 contacted Cleveland Public Power about concerns over power outages over the past four weeks.
The utility company said it won't have a detailed 2018 renovation plan until the city passes a 2018 budget in the coming weeks.
Cleveland Public Power issued the following statement in response to our story:
"On January 22 at approximately 3:27 am, 340 customers were affected by an outage that occurred at West 65th and Lorain. Power was restored to our customers within 40 minutes...We want our customer to know, Cleveland Public Power maintains over 50 miles of transmission lines and over 900 miles of distribution lines which offers our customers redundancy in restoring power quickly."
