Exclusive Interview with JCPL John Meehan and Committeeman Lichtenstein

good afternoon I'm committeeman mayoral offense in the league with Township and I have the fortunate opportunity to be sitting here with John mian our representative at the electric company I'll let John talk about his job a little bit but John I do want to compliment you we've over the past six months since you've started we've had an opportunity to work on a lot of things for our town I'm sure you're going to talk about some of the schools that you got online very very quickly I know that you know whatever it is an average no matter what time of the day and I lose get all to me especially if it affects our senior communities so that we can activate whatever OEM we need to I know you're in touch now police chief with the mayor the deputy mayor and the other members in township committee so I want to welcome you I know your office's hair and liquid and we hope pervading good host and very much appreciate all the hard work that you do and certainly we enjoyed working with be Jonah it was not there before you and you're doing an excellent external job representing your company and we couldn't be happier to work with you thank you very thank you I'm John me in an area manager for Jersey Central Power and Light here in lakewood i am tasked with communicating with it the mayor the elected officials the police ova and the community meetings in this town and 17 other towns that I cover my main responsibility is to making sure that there's a open discussion between the townships and India power company to make sure that we are on same page recently as mayor said we have been for schools that have just come online in lakewood and these were for larger projects and the lakewood line that we work at these are the men women that are do the work in our office and up in our in our line trucks construction crews specifically who put the power on with the lights on these guys really went to out of the way to make sure that these projects were done in time too so the schools could open so that the students had a chance to to involve any schools before the the season started and I wanted to congratulate them and congratulate the township on these four schools that will serve the community very well thank you John and I know you've come to our Lueck which is our Lakewood utility advisory committee meetings and work with members of our committee as well to recognize the concerns of like but I know you're a very willing partner with us in our ventures to make sure that our streets are welded that there's plenty of a light out on the sidewalks on the streets and put hundreds of new lights in and upgraded probably over a thousand lights here in liquid awe and your continuous helping that is very appreciated I know that you were talking that there was a large investment that your company was making into infrastructure yes we recognize the demand for electricity is rising throughout our service area and we've committed 260 million dollars in 2015 alone in transmission distribution and other projects to reinforce our system to make it more resilient and meet the expectations are our customers as they as our service area expands so like for example the you know we know we're coming up on our Akane season it's in this and then we have our hopefully not but we get our blizzards Constance and out comes the fun and during this summer we have these high demands on the air conditioning and gas systems so this money that you're allocating is a job specific is it just a structure base that build up all the transmission stations which I think means we're there like the electric gets generated put into this station and transmit it out except yes the transmission lines are think of as the highways and our distribution lines are the side roads so the transmission lines bring the power into the area of substations then decrease the power and send a thorough distribution lines so there's 267 million dollars it is is to to help to strengthen that system to make our electrical system more resilient last year alone we spent a hundred million dollars in 160 different projects to help strengthen the system it on top of that you have mentioned hurricane see one of the main causes of our outages are trees tree limbs when they fall down when they're under hitting up against our lines we're going to continue our efforts in tree trimming we have in lakewood alone this year by the end of 2015 we will have trimmed 39 miles of lines to make sure that these is and as a result our tree related outages have decreased by 22% service area so we are we're on top of this they're on top of this we were listening to our communities we hear the demand and we are are being proactive in an art approach thank you John and please pass townships tanks on from you up to to the top of the people in the company and to the people that are out there on the roads the ones that come out during the storms the ones that are doing all this work means a lot to us if we certainly see the results our relationship with JCP know is certainly getting better and better or the client so we really appreciate it thank you I appreciate the opportunity bear thank you thank