The Frederick City Council held a work session on July 14, 2026, covering presentations on burying overhead power lines, enhancing wireless connectivity, updates to the moderately priced dwelling unit (MPDU) ordinance, and a proposed noise ordinance revision. Presentations were given by Potomac Edison, Milestone Towers, and the City Attorney's Office, with public comment heard on the noise ordinance and previous items.
One nation under God. Indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Great, thank you. And uh we're we're going to switch uh switch presentations. One and two remain as advertised. We're going to put the moderately priced dwelling unit ordinance discussion start uh as number three and then finish up with the noise ordinance. So uh if uh if our power placement person could come up. There we go. Thank you. Yes, please, I'm sorry. And uh the microphone, you have to hit the button, the red light goes on. Well, actually, you're your number two. Okay. Yep, sorry. I'm sorry, we don't have a crazy. And if you could introduce yourself and your company, and uh you because of the way the world works, we have to talk uncomfortably close to the microphone to make it. Okay. There we go. My name is Dave Klein uh with Potomac Edison. We're up at 421 East Patrick Street, and I manage external affairs for Potomac Edison in Maryland. And uh I got the question to come and talk about burying power lines in the city. And actually, I think we discussed that on the streets about six months ago. And uh so I don't have a formal presentation with pictures and so forth, but I did come to answer questions and and tell you how the process works. Um a little bit of history uh back in the 80s when I started at Potomac Edison, we were fully regulated from distribution, transmission, uh generation, power plants, it was all Potomac Edison. And the way we worked, if a project whatever came up and there was something we needed to do to improve uh service, then we would do it, and every year we would go in for a road case to ask for a rate, you know, rate increase or whatever to cover whatever we did. The world changed in the late 90s with deregulation. Uh we divested uh the power plant division is a separate company, transmission became a separate company. Actually, um, as point of fact, in 1994, we had asked, we had done a rate case for a rate increase, and we did not have another one, another rate increase at request until 2018. So we went 24 years on the same race. So we're pretty frugal. We have a pretty good history of being frugal. Um we deregulated in the late 90s, another thing happened before we were completely regulated in what we you know could or could not do, we did get permission then from the Service Commission from the Public Service Commission that we could do what we call premium service or customer requested work. And the rules of generally of our tariff and of our world changed in that the philosophy was that uh uh a grandmother someplace sitting on a fixed income should not see her rate increase because of industrial growth or any kind of residential growth someplace else. So the tariff was designed that for uh commercial industrial growth and development so forth, those customers paid basically to get the service and then they were on their rate. Um so it's kind of pay as you go. And that's the th uh the philosophy behind the uh premium service, the customer requested work. We can do pretty much whatever you ask as long as it's not uh illegal or unsafe. Um there are things that we can do, things that we will do, things that we cannot do, and things that we won't do. I'll give you an example. If you look down uh Patrick Street and Frederick, you know, you don't see any transformers, you don't see anything. That was done many years ago, and we would never do that again. Um the there are deep vaults there, transformers are buried in the deep vaults, everything is underground, and we have had some serious problems over the years because of that. We won't do it again. As an example, um I think it was 2002 when a hurricane came through, a lot of rain and flooding and so forth. Well, those vaults fill with water. And when the restaurants and people downtown are out of power, they want it back because it's their life. You know, I am the first person that hears about that. Um the issue we ran into there is when the when a vault fills with water and we have to pump it out, you can't pump it out into the street, it's got to be collected, hauled off, and and tested. Well, the only company that could do that was out in Cumberland. So we had to call and wait for a truck in the midst of all these storms, a special a specialized company to come to pump out the underground vaults just so we could get in to work on them.