South Lyon Council Frustrated with Lack of Progress on EV Chargers
September 10, 2024
![South Lyon Council Frustrated with Lack of Progress on EV Chargers](/dbphotos/displaywidth/2b049f69ea0c5f2217f36f99a1a2b67f/600/a.jpg)
Nik Rajkovic / news@whmi.com
South Lyon City Council is at odds with its Downtown Development Authority over the lack of progress on electric vehicle chargers.
“DTE has approved, based on what we’ve been told, three out of the five locations. Now it’s on this ChargEV that is giving us excuses,” Councilman Alex Hansen told DDA Director Nate Mack Monday night.
“It sounds to me like we should hire a different company, or look at a different company at this point. The City of Farmington had their EV chargers within six months. It’s been three years,” Hansen added.
Councilwoman Margaret Kurtzweil piggybacked on Hansen’s concerns with ChargEV.
“Are there contractual restrictions that would prevent you from going out and looking for an alternate supplier or vendor?” she asked Mack.
“We have entered into a contract with them. I don’t know the specifics of how we could get out of it,” Mack answered. “I’d have to go back and look at it, and probably talk to the attorney about it.”
“I would clearly look at what a default is, failure to perform, and just see whether or not the contract had deadlines in which they have continued to fail to meet, or whether they were left open,” Kurtzweil added.
Mack told council the city’s first deal fell through. The city then entered into a contract with ChargEV last year.
“The deal we have in place currently is not very expensive for the city to get the chargers in place,” he said. “The DDA was going to be the organization that was paying for a bulk of these things. The DDA doesn’t have a very big budget, so we’re left with what we can do.”
Council members asked what changed, believing the chargers were going to be installed free of charge, with the city earning a percentage of revenues.
“They (ChargEV) have proposed, although we haven’t seen it in official form yet, that we would be paying a portion of the install fee and they would increase the revenue sharing on the back end,” said Mack.
No action was taken on the matter.