Power! Take Yours Back and Make Sure Con-Ed Stays ON IT

I just received some info about the next Power for the People (PFP) event, a Volunteer and Planning Meeting, Saturday, April 28 at 11am, at All Saints Church hall in Sunnyside (43-12 46th Street, one block north of the 7 train 46th St.-Bliss St. stop). They plan to catch people up on what the group has been doing during the winter. Topics to be discussed:

1. PSC voted to put Con Ed on trial for the outage. Last week, the PSC finally decided to essentially put Con Ed on trial through a "prudence proceeding," which can prevent Con Ed from passing on outage-related captial expenses to us as a rate hike. This is an important victory that everyone contributed to, which we will talk about at the meeting. Here is a link to an April 22 Daily News editorial on this titled Con Ed must get zapped.

2. Con Ed's request for settlement talks. Con Ed tried to short-circuit the prudence proceeding by offering settlement talks to resolve some outage issues (such as retroactive payment for our non-food losses) but also to avoid taking blame. PFP wrote a letter opposing this strategy (read it at our website) and we'll talk about this, too.

3. Summer is coming: outage preparation. The PSC investigators say there is no way to know whether we could have another outage this summer because of stress on the Long Island City network from last year's outage. A PFP activist with Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) training will talk about how to prepare.

4. Future PFP Activities. These include a possible public forum on "getting ready for summer & outage preparation;" a possible picket or other activity to protest Con Ed's new, 3-year rate hike request (due on May 4!); and a possible Flashlight March through the community on the first anniversary of the outage.

We look forward to seeing you at the April 28 meeting.

Western Queens Power for the People Campaign (718) 512-5442; powerforthepeople2006@hotmail.com