by Sylene Argent
At its regular meeting on Monday evening, members of Kingsville Council discussed the letter E.L.K. Energy Inc. sent in response to the letter the Town of Kingsville sent in October.
That initial letter asked the members of the Town of Essex, as the owner of E.L.K. Energy Inc., to direct the local utility to get its executive leadership and Board of Directors to complete a comprehensive review of the electrical supply to determine why its supply is unreliable, why E.L.K. is unresponsive to customer complaints and concerns, and why E.L.K. won’t work with the Town of Kingsville on a road use agreement.
After this motion was approved and forwarded to E.L.K. and the Town of Essex, the Town of Kingsville received a response and organized a meeting with Kingsville Mayor Nelson Santos, Deputy Mayor Gord Queen, and CAO John Norton and their counterparts at the Town of Essex on November 17.
“I thought it was a very good meeting,” Norton said. “I thought they listened and we had a good discussion and raised significant concerns the community has. We did find out the Mayor [Larry Snively] himself and certainly some of the other staff members and the Deputy Mayor there were not fully aware of all the problems happening in our community.”
Norton noted the reps from Essex asked that more specific information be provided.
Coming out to the meeting, Norton said he and Mayor Santos have reached out to Kingsville business owners that use E.L.K. as their electrical service provider to keep track of outages and impacts to them.
The correspondence sent to the Town of Kingsville, Norton said, is the first he has heard from E.L.K. on the matter, but he is looking forward to the utility addressing the issues raised.
Councillor Tony Gaffan added residents should also keep a diary of any issues as well, as there are individuals who are on dialysis and have experienced outages. “I think it needs to be broader, so they understand, really, the real impact of the entire community that runs off of E.L.K.”
The letter sent to Kingsville from E.L.K. was from Chief Financial Officer and Director of Stakeholder Relations, Cheryl Tratechaud. It recognizes having received Kingsville’s resolution.
“We appreciate these matters being brought to our attention and are committed to providing exceptional value and services to our customers, the residents and businesses of Kingsville and Essex. Please know we take the issues raised in the Town’s resolution seriously and we are taking steps to review our policies and operations, specifically as they relate to: service disruptions and outages, our customer complaint resolution process, concerns raised by customers regarding abutting trees, new customer connections, and joint road use discussions.”
Any further feedback from Kingsville was also encouraged in the letter from E.L.K.