City officials have sent notices to state regulators that they object to FirstEnergy’s request to the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio for permission to take longer to fix future power outages.
Bay Village Mayor Paul Koomar, center, signed a letter emailed to the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio in which the city objects to FirstEnergy's proposed changes to reliability standards.BAY VILLAGE, Ohio – City officials have sent notices to state regulators that they object to FirstEnergy’s request to the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio forThe city administration sent a letter dated Jan.
13 to the PUCO objecting to the request. The letter was signed by Mayor Paul Koomar and Public Service Director Mary Kay Costello. In addition, City Council adopted a resolution during a Jan. 20 meeting that echoed the administration’s objections. “The PUCO is looking at this on a statewide basis,” Bay Village Law Director Mark Barbour said. “It’s very important that the city voices its objection. That’s the purpose, to let the PUCO know that the residents of Bay Village do not approve of this, and we have had outages, and to put that on the PUCO’s radar.” FirstEnergy has asked that the PUCO allow Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co., Ohio Edison, and Toledo Edison to extend the time it takes to restore service after an outage. The three companies are subsidiaries of FirstEnergy. “In the past years, and especially in 2024 and 2025, the city has experienced repeated and prolonged power outages throughout the city and especially in its Ward 3 area,” Komar and Costello wrote in their letter to the PUCO. “For example, Ward 3 experienced seven power outages in eight months in 2025 alone. These outages appear to be a growing trend.” The outages create serious risks to public safety, including disruptions of powered medical equipment, loss of heat and air conditioning, loss of refrigerated foods and medicines, and financial hardships for residents, according to the letter. “Reduction in reliability standards would be to the detriment of the residents of Bay Village, who already face increasing outages and prolonged restoration times,” according to the letter from the Bay Village city officials. “FirstEnergy has charged customers increased rates for grid modifications to allow ‘faster restoration of service following outages,’ according to PUCO filings. Yet, the city has not experienced faster restoration nor decreased outages since 2019. Reductions in service after increasing rates will not benefit customers.” City Council, after passing a resolution that repeated much of the same language, emailed a copy of the resolution to the PUCO. State regulators set standards for how long an average power outage lasts and how many times the average customer loses power in a year. CEI, which provides electric service to Bay Village, failed to meet its average outage standards for two years and now wants more flexibility. CEI wants to increase its average wait for reconnection from 135 minutes to 150.49 minutes, according to the utility companies’ Ohio Edison requested about three extra minutes per outage , while Toledo Edison sought about 12 more minutes from their current average times. Ohio Edison and Toledo Edison, but not CEI, requested an increase in the average number of interruptions per customer per year. After months of filings, the case is moving into the hearing stage. The first evidentiary hearing is scheduled for Feb 26. FirstEnergy, in an emailed statement to cleveland.com, said it remains committed to restoring power as quickly as safely possible in every outage situation. “The new standards are calculated based on actual reliability data, including number of outages, duration and cause, from the past five years,” wrote Jennifer Young, FirstEnergy’s manager of corporate communications. “That means the updated standards reflect reality – what we are seeing and what customers are experiencing now versus when the older standards were created using years-old data. “While we acknowledge and are addressing instances of equipment challenges in some areas, overall, it’s smaller but disruptive weather events, heavier rainfall and trees outside our rights-of-way falling into electrical equipment that drive these changes. According to NOAA , severe weather events in Ohio have tripled in recent years – from an average of 2.3 per year to 7.2 per year ." FirstEnergy is investing more than $3 billion through 2029 to strengthen poles, wires and equipment across Ohio, according to Young’s statement.last October with residents of the city’s Ward 3, at which they outlined steps the utility would be taking to improve infrastructure in the area to reduce power outages. During the Oct. 7 meeting, FirstEnergy discussed plans to upgrade a power pole leading into one development near Lincoln Road and Dwight Drive, which has mostly underground electric lines, to reduce or eliminate outages caused by animals accessing above-ground power equipment. It also announced plans to replace sections of the underground cable in 2026 that have degraded over time due to moisture, insulator breakdown, and thermal stress., the utility said it also would investigate the causes of power outages in a neighborhood in Ward 4, near the western edge of the city.
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