Mayor's Corner: PUCO Investigation Finds Fault with First Energy
As many of you have experienced first-hand, FirstEnergy Corp has had a recent track record of consistently failing to provide reliable, adequate power to the people of Lakewood. The problem resulted in me joining with Cleveland City Councilmen Kazy and Slife to send a letter to the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio demanding an investigation and action. The initial response from PUCO was encouraging – PUCO promised to investigate – and we got further news last week.
On Friday, July 25th, PUCO issued a six-page letter to FirstEnergy informing the company that PUCO was giving “notice of probable non-compliance” in FirstEnergy’s obligations to Lakewood. Specifically, PUCO wrote that data gathered regarding the most recent severe outages – from June 22 through July 7, 2025 – “are classified as being caused by equipment or line failure.”
Of particular interest in the PUCO letter is the following information: PUCO employees did site visits to FirstEnergy facilities serving Lakewood and “identified a significant amount of infrastructure that seemed, on the whole, older than infrastructure found elsewhere.” They also found that the failing infrastructure serving Lakewood has been known by FirstEnergy for years – with arts of this equipment appearing on its “worst performing circuits” list every year since at least 2021.
PUCO also faulted FirstEnergy for its pathetic communications with our community during these outages. The following sentence from the PUCO letter truly says it all: “[FirstEnergy] shared that it did not send automated telephone notifications to customers experiencing outages in excess of 11 hours because it classified these outages as “brief” in duration.” This is the kind of lazy and unconcerned attitude that makes people justifiably enraged at public utilities.
The PUCO letter confirms what many of us in Lakewood suspected – that the issues were not weather related, accident related, or acts of god. The outages over the past year are in fact a clear “failure” by FirstEnergy and its equipment; FirstEnergy knew of these major problems with that “worst performing” equipment for years; and FirstEnergy chose not to address those problems, resulting in harm to Lakewood and surrounding Cleveland communities. The icing on the cake is that FirstEnergy still does not seem to take any of this seriously and thinks 11 hours of outages is not a long time to lose power.
PUCO ended its letter by proposing corrective action, including that FirstEnergy submit a detailed plan to address the reliability issues for Lakewood and surrounding areas, including funding, staffing, and equipment. FirstEnergy must now respond to PUCO’s charge of probable non-compliance by August 8th. The letter also included language stating the if FirstEnergy did not comply PUCO could issue “forfeitures of up to $10,000 per violation, per day.”
I am greatly encouraged by the efforts of PUCO to investigate this matter swiftly, get to the bottom of the issues, and use its sole authority of Ohio public utilities to take action against FirstEnergy. The City of Lakewood is thankful to PUCO staff and leadership for taking this matter so seriously, including Chair Jennifer French who took time to speak with me personally regarding what was happening in our city and how our residents were suffering. I look forward to hearing more about PUCO’s efforts to deliver long-term solutions on this critical issue for Lakewood. I will, as always, keep you all informed as we hear more.
Mayor Meghan F. George
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