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City Council Considers Illinois Municipal Electric Agency Partnership Moving Forward

It was a long meeting for Carmi City Council Tuesday night.  Nearly an hour and 15 minutes of the hour and a half gathering was dedicated to hearing from President and CEO of the Illinois Municipal Electric Agency, Kevin Gaden and VP of Government Affairs with IMEA, Staci Wilson.  The duo travelled down from the state capital in Springfield to pitch the city’s continued participation in its 32-member coalition.  The delivery period wouldn’t start until 2035 however.  The reason the organization needs to know if the city intends to continue participation now?  Gaden and Wilson say IMEA is working now to replace resources going offline between now and 2035 and without cities indicating their 20-year agreement extension intention, IMEA can’t make agreements to procure power for members beyond 2035.  The concern for council isn’t necessarily the IMEA rates which have remained flat over the previous decade and are currently projected to remain that way.  The concern comes in with transmission of that power.  Those are lines that Ameren owns and costs for that have skyrocketed and are only expected to go higher.

Not just Ameren, but the entire country is going to be going into a pretty significant transmission growth mode.  Frankly, Ameren has done a pretty good job of upgrading facilities in the state to create some new substations, some good backbone.  Probably a good long term investment.  So we’ve seen a significant increase.  I’ll also tell you, this entire region is called MISO and I think we’ve talked about it before, not just Ameren Illinois, but also Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin and parts of Missouri, MISO has just announced they’re going to be developing about $22 billion worth of additional transmission in this region to ensure that power can be delivered from here to there reliably in the long term so I would say that I think transmission costs are going to go up even higher than where they are today.

Council ended up tabling the matter for now so members could further research and educate themselves on the situation.  They’ll need to indicate their intention to participate by the end of April.

The other thirteen agenda items took all of about 13 minutes to get through.  Among them, approving a repair estimate for light plant engine #7 for $26,517.88, approval of Stop Loss Insurance renewal, approval of a Conger and Elliott invoice for $660 related to the Rosebud project, Marshall Electric invoice for generator installation for $6,220.03, two invoices for Brown and Roberts Engineering totaling $13,659.18, both for the Saunders Avenue Project, both payable out of Motor Fuel Tax funds.  Council additionally passed two resolutions on CD’s choosing to reinvest money attached to the police department and motor fuel tax funds.

Council approved another Brown and Roberts Invoice totaling just under $4,000 for water systems improvement payable through the Rebuild Illinois Grant and passed a resolution executing an agreement with the engineering firm to address the unsewered area on Iris Lane.

Council also approved contractor’s final pay estimates from Trikote ($4,000) for the half million-gallon elevated water tank painting, and another to Wigg’s Excavating at $59,562 for work done regarding the pressure reducing station.  Both of those projects were payable out of the Rebuild Illinois Grant as well.

Mike Buckman spoke up before the meeting ended to express his appreciation of city workers and administration surrounding the ice storm.

Thank you mayor, council, and all the city employees for the excellent work when the ice storm…the power was running, you cleaned the roads well, and you guys all did a good job.

Council recessed into executive session at approximately 7:01pm.  There was no action following that closed door gathering.

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