Cleveland Public Power hasn’t shed much light yet on its plan to update the 120-year-old utility after a summer of heat waves, storms and outages disrupted residents’ daily lives and hurt businesses’ bottom lines.
The city has known for years about troubles at CPP, which was founded in 1906 and serves 74,000 customers. A consulting report leaked to WKYC in 2020 described the utility as “mired in systemic, performance and financial issues,” with a system in an “unacceptable, unsafe” condition.
After outages this spring, Mayor Justin Bibb said a “transformation plan” to “modernize” the city-owned electric company was in the works. Months later, CPP hasn’t shared that plan with the public.
But it could soon. Cleveland City Council Member Brian Kazy, who chairs the Utilities Committee, told Signal Cleveland he has seen the plan and expects council to receive a presentation on it Oct. 29.
Fixing CPP won’t be cheap. The city’s utilities director has previously said necessary infrastructure upgrades could cost more than $250 million. Marie Zickefoose, a city spokesperson, said the plan is a long-term one that doesn’t have a single price tag.
“The plan is intended to provide a long-term roadmap for CPP, including priorities around reliability, customer experience, our workforce and operational fundamentals, and the utility’s long-term financial health,” she wrote in an email.
In the meantime, customers have their own ideas for overhauling the utility. They told Signal Cleveland they want infrastructure improvements, better communication with customers and more understandable bills.
“It seems like pretty impossible to just continue as it is,” said Max Tomassoni, a CPP customer and Cleveland Documenter who lost power in July. “Fourth of July weekend was bordering on like a state of emergency. It was so hot, I mean it was dangerous.”
Once known as Muny Light, CPP has long competed with investor-owned FirstEnergy and its corporate predecessor. FirstEnergy has taken heat over its own power failures, especially from Lakewood elected officials and the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio.
Unlike the FirstEnergy, CPP is directly overseen by a mayor and City Council members who can influence how it provides power to customers — and how it responds when the lights go out.
Here is what customers say they want from their city’s public electric option.
‘Keeping the lights on’: Take care of CPP’s infrastructure
One customer request is an obvious one: reliable electrical service.
“Keeping the lights on is the first thing,” said Sharon Rose, a Glenville resident who uses CPP at a rental property she owns in Slavic Village. She lost power this year both in Slavic Village and at her Glenville home, where she uses FirstEnergy’s service.
At a meeting in Ohio City in July, CPP Commissioner Ammon Danielson acknowledged the utility has a “very old distribution system” with a history of deferred maintenance. For instance, the utility needs to invest in backing up its substations so that they don’t fail, he said.
Danielson cautioned that if CPP increases its costs, customers would have to pay more. The Bibb administration had legislation introduced in September to restructure rates and raise them over the next three years.
Another way to bring more money into the system is to expand it to new customers, such as Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.
In recent years, CPP has studied the fixes it needs to make to its electrical distribution system, which covers most — but not all — of the city. So far, CPP hasn’t released that study to the public.
Ohio City resident Jonathan Welle wants more detail on CPP’s infrastructure needs.
“We want to see the city name those and find funding as soon as possible to address some of those most critical physical infrastructure needs,” he said.
Welle is part of Our CPP, an advocacy group focused on the public electric utility. The organization is pushing for CPP to set up a resident advisory board. Welle also said the city-owned electric company should generate its own clean energy locally. Currently, CPP buys most of its power.
Cleveland is moving ahead with plans to build solar power installations on two landfills, one on West 11th Street and another near Hopkins airport. The city is also studying the creation of a battery system to store energy until customers need it during peak hours.
Solve the ‘breakdown in communication’ during outages
In July, Danielson acknowledged CPP’s failures in communicating with customers when the power went out. The utility’s online outage map isn’t good enough, he said; it shows areas hit by widespread outages, but not by smaller ones.
CPP’s call center was too small to handle floods of complaints during major outages, he said. And until just before that July meeting, the utility’s customer call-back feature was not working, he said.
Dr. Jeremiah Escajeda, an emergency medicine physician who lives in Ohio City, attended that July meeting and gave Danielson credit for facing residents’ questions.
But he said it was “totally inexcusable” that CPP’s phone system couldn’t handle all inbound calls during the July outage. He told Signal Cleveland that his internet service provider has notified him that the power is out before CPP seems to know about it.
“The biggest hang up that happened during the Fourth of July outage was the breakdown in communication from CPP,” Escajeda said “And that was extremely problematic. There was essentially zero communication to customers about real-time restoration of power.”
He said that he thought of neighbors who relied on oxygen machines. They could end up going to the emergency room if they don’t know when the power will return, he said.
Clarify CPP bills and trim the trees
Rose, the Glenville resident who uses both CPP and FirstEnergy, has a bone to pick with the city’s bills.
CPP bills include what is called a “power supply recovery charge.” That cost accounted for roughly half of the total charges in bills she shared with Signal Cleveland.
Rose wants the city to do a better job explaining that charge. She hasn’t been satisfied with the explanations she has received from CPP customer service.
“How are you calculating the fee?” she said. “We would love to know, if we’re paying, what we’re paying for and how much we’re truly paying. I think that would be a help to all customers.”
Zickefoose said that charge “ allows CPP to recover costs incurred for the purchase of electric power” that it provides to its customers.
Another Glenville resident, Charlene Patterson, said she didn’t experience power outages this summer — or at least not long ones. She recently appeared in a city video highlighting home repairs that she said lowered her energy costs.
She suggested CPP should listen to residents’ complaints about tree limbs crowding into electrical wires. But on the whole, she gave CPP good marks.
That’s likely welcome news for the more than century-old, city-owned electric utility that will spend the foreseeable future locked in competition with its investor-owned rival.
“I like the way they do things,” Patterson said. “I would never leave from Cleveland Public Power.”
