Sanchez closes with call for immediate public notification of outages
Sanchez states outages shouldn't be kept secret, arguing the public should have been notified by 6:40 a.m. on August 18 so people could seek alternative help. He calls keeping outages hidden unacceptable and not how good government works. Gelobter says they will look at public notification policies.
Well, thank you so much.
I'll pause now.
I have more questions, but I'll let my colleagues go next.
But I just want to say that these outages, they shouldn't be kept a secret.
I would say that we first learned about the August outage by 6.40 a.m., and I think the public should have been notified immediately rather than doing a full investigation.
We know that there's calls that aren't going through.
The public should be notified so that if they're calling and their call isn't going through, so that they could think about other ways of getting help.
These are issues every second counts, whether you need help from our police department or our fire department or our EMS department, every single second counts.
And if we're telling people that if they have an emergency, they should call 911, and that system is out, we should tell them about that so they could think about other ways of getting help.
Keeping these outages and sweeping them under a rug and pretending like they're not happening, that is just unacceptable, and it is outrageous, and it is not how good government works.
Understood.
And we are absolutely going to be looking at our policies around public notification and figuring out when is the right time to notify folks.
Thank you, Chair Felice.
Chair Riola.