HURRICANE, W.Va.—After receiving public comments, AEP has made the decision not to expand their transmission line in Putnam County through a popular biking/hiking trail.
In August, American Electric Power Company released a proposal stating that they wanted to build 20 miles worth of transmission line through the Meeks Mountain Trails in the county.
Before they made their final decision, AEP held public comment hearings in order to hear feedback from Putnam County residents about the trail, while also receiving feedback from social media, emails, and phone calls.
At the public comment hearing on August 13, Sarah Doerner a Putnam County community member and part of the group who helped build the trails, told Metronews that the announcement made her sick.
“Honestly I was sick,” Doerner said. “It’s really devastating. We’ve been impacted in a positive way with this trail system and the folks that we have met. We have a completely new group of friends that we didn’t even know lived around here.”
And Robert Stonestreet, the Vice President of the Meeks Mountain Trail Alliance, also told Metronews at the same hearing, that the trail has been embraced by people in the county and across the state.
“It’s been an amazing project,” Stonestreet said. “We’ve had so many people come in from out of town, but the people of Hurricane and Putnam County really have embraced it. We get 200-300 people a day out on these trails.”
These comments were just a few that were made at that the hearing, plus more from other hearings as well.
Director of communications for AEP, George Porter said that hearing from the public is exactly what they wanted and now they know the importance of the trails to everyone.
“You know we always want to get to the open house; we want to get community feedback, we want to hear what’s important we want to hear things that we don’t know,” Porter said. “We’ve obviously heard a lot, we’ve heard a lot of information from the community and the surrounding neighbors, and we’ve taken all that into consideration and we definitely value that, and we understand the importance of this to the community and so we owe it to everyone to try and find a solution that will not impact those trails.”
He also said that while it will involve more work for AEP, he loved the public comment hearings.
“For people like myself I loved it, because it shows that the process works,” Porter said. “So many times we go to these open houses, all we hear is, you guys already know what you want to, you’ve already made up your mind, you already know that you’re going this way, we don’t.”
With this decision, Porter says that they’ll have to reevaluate what they are going to do with the project.
“Back to the drawing board, you know we’re going to take a step back, reevaluate our routes, see if we can come up with new designs,” Porter said.
He also said that they will have more open houses in Spring 2025, as they propose more options.
Porter also said that they are still going to be looking at building onto the existing line, but also look into other options.
“You know our goal is to try to build on the existing line, so that’s still an option, and we’re going to look into that a little more, dig into that,” Porter said. “We’re going to see what other options we have, so it’s going to take a little more time to do the due diligence needed to make sure we are putting out the best project.”