Lewisville Council to TNMP: Explain Outages or Face PUC Complaint

In closed session Monday night, the Lewisville City Council discussed legal action against Texas New Mexico Power related to its spate of service outages in Lewisville this year.

Just before adjourning, Councilman Neil Ferguson moved to "File a complaint and or initiate an investigatory docket against Texas New Mexico Power with the Public Utility Commission regarding the distribution outages". The motion passed unanimously.

Councilman T.J. Gilmore said that city staff will contact TNMP first to get them to explain themselves and see if they have plans in place to reduce and eliminate repeated failures. "We could have gone straight to the PUC, but we figure this way we can still go there if they aren't responsive," said Gilmore.

TNMP has had numerous non weather-related failures this year, resulting in outages sometimes lasting hours. TNMP explained some of those failures in response to an inquiry from LTJ this summer, but has had an additional three outages since then, all on weekends, including one this past Sunday, November 4th in Northern Lewisville. Citizens complained to the city via Facebook, and said that the power was out for about 40 minutes.