Legislators Hear Kemp Mill Residents' Pepco Complaints

County, state, and national legislators came to Kemp Mill Tuesday night to sympathize with their constituents and to hear their grievances against Pepco after last week’s prolonged power outage.

More than 60 Kemp Mill residents gathered for their quarterly civic association meeting at the at 7:30 p.m., but finding it locked, drove over en masse to the .

Many of the residents told stories of how Pepco had told them their power had been restored when in reality it had not.

Margie Epstein, who has lived in Kemp Mill for 30 years, lost power for five days.

"I had just gone to the grocery store on Friday," she said. "I had to throw it all out."

Now she wanted to hear from her elected representatives why it took Pepco so long to restore electricity to her neighborhood--and what they were going to do to prevent this from happening again.

From the Maryland State Assembly came Del. Ben Kramer (D-Distr. 19) and Del. Bonnie Cullison (D-Distr. 19), who spoke to the legislative challenges of bringing Pepco into line without singling it out for harsher treatment.

“Legislatively, it has to be universal to all of the utilities,” Kramer said, but Montgomery County representatives face pushback from colleagues in other parts of the state where utilities are performing well and are resisting stricter regulations and higher penalties.

“I don’t think Pepco gets it that they’re the Darth Vaders of the utility companies,” Kramer said.

U.S. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Distr. 8) also came to the meeting to encourage residents to keep up the public pressure on Pepco; however, the U.S. Congress has no direct jurisdiction over Pepco.

Montgomery County Councilmember Nancy Floreen (D-At Large) acknowledged that the 20902 ZIP code was one of the hardest hit by the storm in the county. She promised Kemp Mill residents that the council would hold Pepco accountable at the upcoming July 19 hearing.

But Kemp Mill residents do not want Pepco to get off lightly, with the kind of slap-on-the-wrist fine it received in December.

“We don’t want to see additional hearings,” said Selena Snow, who is on the board of the Kemp Mill Civic Association. “We want to see action...It’s time to implement consequences.”

Snow also faults Gov. Martin O’Malley for his “lackadaisical” response because Virginia was quicker to declare a state of emergency.

Mary Crowley, a Kemp Mill resident of 24 years, said that many people in the neighborhood run small businesses out of their homes. Crowley works as a writer and editor, but without Internet access in her home, she decided to go on vacation last week. Her power did not return until the Thursday after the storm.

Several residents called for an infrastructure upgrade to move the wires underground.

“I think it’s a systemic thing we’re dealing with,” said Mae King, another longtime Kemp Mill resident. She was without power for five days and lost everything in her refrigerator.

Although there was plenty of Pepco-bashing, Councilmember George Leventhal (D-At Large) placed some of the blame on the Montgomery County government for what he saw as an inadequate storm response; for example, not having more than two cooling centers available. However, he defended the county’s road clean-up efforts.

Representatives from Council Vice President Nancy Navarro (D-Distr. 4) and Del. Sam Arora (D-Distr. 19) also attended the meeting.