MCLEANSBORO, IL — The McLeansboro City Council dealt with the proposed McLeansboro-Fairfield electricity interconnect and light plant maintenance at Tuesday night’s meeting.

According to another media source and confirmed by our sister station WQRL Wednesday morning, representatives from BHMG spoke to the council about options for backup electricity.

Right now, McLeansboro doesn’t have enough capacity to provide power in case of an outage due to very old equipment. The city can only provide power in an emergency. SIPC and the power plant are the only two sources of power for the city.

Fairfield owns an alternate source line to the SIPC substation in McLeansboro. McLeansboro is looking into how it can use the Fairfield line as a secondary source for power.

McLeansboro could be looking at spending over $3 million or maybe more for maintenance and additional generation to cover the city’s peak load. The city is currently talking to Fairfield about sharing maintenance costs in trade for use of the line for backup power.

The council approved BHMG’s recommendation to let Osmose Utility Services inspect the utility poles for a cost of around $40,000 that will be equally shared between McLeansboro and Fairfield. This will be done so both communities can understand future line maintenance costs estimates and come up with the best way to supply backup power for McLeansboro.