Lights were out for LIPA bigwigs, too

Long Islanders who suspect public and utility officials are receiving preferential treatment during the past week's crippling power outage may take comfort from this: LIPA chairman Howard Steinberg spent three days in the dark.

In an interview Saturday, Steinberg, recovering from a summer motorcycle accident, said he was one of the 523,000 Long Islanders who went without power this week after the lashing by Tropical Storm Irene. "I was out," he said.

All but one of LIPA's trustees also experienced outages, he said. "Trustees get no preferential treatment, I can assure you that," Steinberg said. "When our customers are in the dark, so are we. We understand how customers feel. I get frustrated like everybody else when I'm not getting information."

More to the point, Steinberg, of Great Neck, said he and LIPA's 12 other board members have been watching with growing concern as reports continued to show customers were left with little or no information as power outages lingered. He said the board plans to conduct an extensive review of the storm response once the restoration effort is complete, perhaps as soon as the coming week.

Steinberg, who has continually raised the issue of the need for more and better information for LIPA customers during storm-related outages, said he has been "troubled by the stories I've been hearing about and reading with respect to communications."

But although he plans to launch a trustee-level review with input from public officials and customers, Steinberg stopped short of calls today by two Republican state senators to delay the awarding of the LIPA contract to National Grid until a full review is complete and a new chief executive is appointed. Michael Hervey is LIPA's interim chief and is a candidate for the permanent post. Other lawmakers, including Suffolk Legis. Wayne Horsley (D-Babylon), are calling for a public hearing on the storm response.

LIPA trustees are set to vote on the future structure of the authority, including possibly awarding the management contract, on Sept 22. The board is also considering selling LIPA to a private company and taking on all operations and employees in a municipalization model.

"If, in fact, the board decides to continue with the model of contracting out operations, we will need a substantial period of time to have an orderly transition to a new contract," Steinberg said, noting the contract expires at the end of 2013. "I'm very concerned about delaying that process. last thing we need is to mess up that transition."

Steinberg, an appointee of Gov. George Pataki who has publicly castigated National Grid before, took note of the company's efforts in getting nearly all of the 523,000 customers who lost power back up by Friday. "That's an impressive number," he said. But he added, "It's no secret LIPA has had its issues with National Grid over the years. This has not been a relationship without problems."

He said the trustees will take those issues into consideration as it decides LIPA's future structure.

"We are certainly going to take Grid's performance in this storm and other storms into account, as the governor suggested," Steinberg said, referring to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's suggestion yesterday that National Grid could lose the contract if it didn't "get the power on now."