CLAREMORE, Okla. — Voters in Claremore passed an April measure to increase the sales tax by one penny.
“Now we’ve got this [extra] penny, general fund allocation, and it’s time for us to start doing the things we said that we would do,” Claremore’s city manager John Feary said.
Improving the power grid was a promise from the beginning.
“Our system’s been around since 1904,” Feary said.
WATCH: TAXES AT WORK: Claremore leaders working on improvements for aging power grid
The age alone is grounds for maintenance.
“I think [the grid] is pretty weak. It’s had a lot of damage, because every time we have a storm come through, we lose electricity a lot,” Tammy Sisk, a longtime Claremore resident, said.
Feary said, It’s easy for the weather to harm the system.
“Lighting can be in the area and not even strike somewhere, and cause outages because of static electricity in the air,” Feary said, “The truth is, we actually have a really good reliability rate. But like all of our infrastructure, it can be and needs to be better.”
Five substations are sprinkled around Claremore, but decades of ‘deferred maintenance,’ as Feary puts it, have weakened the systems. Crews are already working to improve the existing substations, but there is one more on the way.
“We need to add a sixth substation,” Feary said.
AN ONGOING ISSUE >>> Brodie Myers covered a city council meeting shortly after a string of outages.
Neighbors like Sisk voted for the investment; now they’re demanding a return on that investment.
“It would be nice if that’s what was actually going to be done to where it would prevent, you know, a lot of problems with the electric going out and everything,” Sisk said.
Feary says the project will take several years, and cost tens of millions of dollars.
“Lead time alone, on transformers, for a 28-megawatt substation, can be three years. Just to order the transformer and auto-transformer. So all that stuff’s going to be considered. We are working on devising that overall actual construction plan right now,” Feary said, “The biggest thing for this is … absolutely is reliability.”
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