City Council heard from DTE concerning the recent outages, took the first step towards a temporary moratorium on new pet stores, and will apply for water and sewer infrastructure grants.
Jennifer Whittaker, DTE governmental relations, gave a presentation on the recent power outages in Berkley. They acknowledged they need to do better and gave updates on their future plans. This includes tree trimming, preventative maintenance, more automation, and accelerating work to rebuild the grid.
She explained the changes in the outage map. Consumers Energy and DTE were the only major utilities in the country still using the old polygon-based maps. They switched to the numbers-based map a few weeks before the storm. They thought they would have time to test it, but the storm popped up before they could finish testing. This lead to reports of outages where there were none or people having power when they did not.
Below is a map of the parts of the city where they will be conducting tree trimming this year.
The first reading of a six-month moratorium on businesses selling dogs and cats was passed. The purpose is to give Council time to properly develop regulations while temporarily preventing new businesses from starting or the existing business from expanding.
The city is applying for grants to help inventory lead service lines that need to be replaced and plan for future flood mitigation projects.
The meeting packet.