ATLANTA — Georgia’s Public Service Commission got an earful Thursday from Atlanta's Old Fourth Ward residents, who want to rein in a Georgia Power project that has already displaced nine home sites in a neighborhood just west of the beltline.
It's a story that has about a handful of Atlanta residents taking on a powerful utility company – a conflict residents concede the business has mostly already won.
"I’m asking that someone here on the commission to intervene," John Rose, an O4W resident said.
He is among the residents who have lived for years with a Georgia Power substation or transformer station in their neighborhood. And now, the utility aims to expand the project.
Georgia Power has bought nine residential parcels and plans to bulldoze those it hasn’t already in order to build a bigger and, as the utility says, a better and more modern substation.
Residents told the PSC the substation expansion would sprawl onto property adjacent to their homes.
"They’re about to tear down all of our fifty foot trees and replace it with 65 foot transmission towers," Rose told the five-member PSC, whose commissioners are elected statewide.
Georgia Power said it has been transparent about the plan, claiming the expansion is needed to serve Atlanta’s booming population. It bought the property required from residents who sold willingly without using eminent domain.
But residents who didn’t sell said the already looming transformer station would become an even bigger eyesore.
"This expansion as planned will have a profoundly negative impact on the Old Fourth Ward community, on our health, our property values and our quality of life," resident David Garner told the PSC.
The PSC chair said its staff had helped communication between the utility and aggrieved residents.
"It is a local issue. We wish them well," chair Tricia Pridemore told 11Alive News following the hearing, adding, "We don’t directly regulate, and our staff doesn’t directly regulate where they put their properties. It’s really based upon a need for output in an area."
However, the PSC approves Georgia Power's requests for rate hikes, creating a relationship that gives the PSC influence on matters like this one.
In addition to the PSC, residents have contacted city council members and even a member of Congress. Yet they admit the substation expansion is a done deal; the remaining questions now are: How big? And how soon?