Clear Lake council sets public hearing for ITC electric transmission franchise renewal

CLEAR LAKE — Clear Lake’s City Council has set a public hearing for next month on an electric transmission franchise renewal with ITC Midwest. The company in 2007 acquired the electric transmission services of Alliant Energy. Since then, they’ve made investments across their nearly 6700 circuit miles of transmission lines to improve reliability and have decreased outages on the transmission side by 63%.

Acting city administrator Jacob Widman says ITC Midwest has been operating under Alliant’s franchise agreement, but now they are looking to operate under their own separate agreement.  “Back in October of last year, we renewed that 15-year agreement with Alliant. ITC usually comes along after that and does their own franchise agreement.”

Widman says as an electric transmission provider, the agreement grants them the right to acquire, construct, reconstruct, erect, maintain, operate and remove a transmission system for electric power within the city.   “They are an electric transmission provider, meaning they don’t sell directly to like the citizens of Clear Lake. They sell to the power distribution like Alliant Energy, who would sell it to the citizens. They are kind of a step before the citizens. If you recall the franchise agreement that we did with Alliant had a franchise as being there, that would not be considered in this agreement because their contracts are directly with Alliant Energy and with the customers right here in Clear Lake.”

The council set their July 7th meeting for the public hearing on the renewal.