CLAREMORE — This week’s city council meeting in Claremore was quite well attended, as residents wanted answers about what they say is an inordinately high number of power outages.

Some also lodged complaints about utility rates, and wondered why the city sells electricity to residents and businesses, rather than contracting with a utility company to provide the service directly.

[Hear the KRMG In-Depth Report on the Claremore electrical grid HERE]

Claremore City Manager John Feary spent well over a half hour speaking on the topic, and answering questions.

He said the utility rates charged by the city correspond fairly closely with other cities of similar size who also sell electricity.

And selling electricity is something Claremore has done since the beginning, he added.

“This community was built on selling electricity over a hundred years ago,” Feary said during Monday’s meeting. “We were selling electricity before we were selling water. We were selling electricity before we were collectin sales tax.”

Moreover, the city relies heavily on that income, because sales taxes don’t bring in any where near the amount of revenue it needs annually for basic services and infrastructure.

“Undoing that is possible, but it’s going to take decades,” Feary said. “You don’t put the bullet back into the gun. So, that’s why were so dependent on utility rates.”

As for the outages, he admits they have real issues with infrastructure.

Of the city’s four substations, one has been overhauled, Feary said, but the others will require quite a bit of work.

That takes time - supply chain issues don’t help, he said - and it takes money.

But he maintains that that plan makes more sense than replacing the old equipment.

The most troublesome part of the grid he identified as Substation Two.

“The simplest answer to Substation Two is to go out and purchase - it’s a 28-megawatt substation - is to go out an purchase another 20 megawatt or 25 megawatt transformer. Anybody want to take a guess at what that would cost us? Eight or nine million dollars, and it’s about a two to four year lead time to get that here.”

The bottom line, he said, is that the city’s well aware of the problems, and has not ignored them, saying “I don’t want people to think that we’re not investing, and we’re not identifying, we’re not... we are, we have, and we will continue to do so.”