Batavia City Council approves new electrical wiring in area of recent power outages

The Batavia City Council approved an emergency contract Monday night to install new electrical wiring in the area of Pine Street and Woodland Hill Drive after several recent power outages.

The $129,984 contract with Ray’s Electric and Boring Services was approved in response to the outages Sept. 19 and 20, according to meeting documents.

“Several weeks ago, we ended up having several power outages within a two-hour span,” Alderman Keenan Miller said. “What happened was we had some faulty wires that shorted out. Those wires are at the end of their life cycle so it’s time to replace them.”

Miller said City Electric was able to temporarily fix the wiring until a replacement was found.

“Now we’re going to need to bore some new conduits in,” he said. “This is to replace those so now we don’t have more outages on the east side.”

The council approved waiving a formal bidding process to expedite the installation of the new conduit, which according to documents is set to begin as soon as the contact is approved. The city requested a quote from Ray’s Electric and Boring Services because they already were working on another contract in town.

In other news, Mayor Jeffery Schielke said Batavia is looking to install new security cameras in the downtown area.

“Because of the intelligence and information that’s been shared with us by our new police chief about the vandalism and the issues that have been taking place in downtown Batavia, and we’ve got several different things going on,” Schielke said. “In the coming budget that you’re all going to get, [City Administrator] Laura Newman will [show] that Batavia is going to go back into the camera downtown monitoring business.

“We’re going to propose that we monitor strategic locations in downtown Batavia,” Schielke added.

Schielke said the cameras likely will be placed on East and West Wilson streets and Batavia Avenue.