LMU GENERATING PLANT WILL CLOSE

The days are numbered for Logansport's electric generating plant.

"The generating plant is going to cease operations no later than January 31 of 2016."

That's LMU Superintendent Paul Hartman, who updated the Utility Service Board on the situation Tuesday night.

Hartman, incoming mayor Dave Kitchell and the Utility Service Board's five members all expressed concern for the plant's employees.

Kitchell told the Utility Service Board he wants to do everything he can to keep the people there employed.

"We're going to probably offer a lot of options to employees that include, maybe, buyouts for some of the senior-level folks and Duke Energy has already agreed to help with retraining for jobs at other power plants, and they've done that in other cities, so they've been willing to do it. We'll continue to look at generating options and natural gas seems to be the prevailing option right now, but there are other jobs within the city itself that these people can do, that we need to have done. The Memorial Home, the Memorial Center, is one of those places where we're going to have to have work done. It needs to reopen, it needs to be ready, and we've had it closed up now for more than a year, and there are several places in the city where we need to do that. Similar to last year when employees from all city departments worked on the city pool, but they had jobs to go back to, now we have people that won't have jobs, but we've got plenty to do in the city. So, I think we just have to repurpose them for now, until we can get to generating capacity again and train that next generation of employees for that. It won't be a one size fits all approach for every employee but we're going to try to make sure that they stay employed, they stay insured and they stay as members and contributors of the Public Employees Retirement Fund, which is PERF."

Hartman says the decision affects ONLY LMU's generating plant on Race Street, and not any of LMU's other services.

"It does not affect any kind of distribution and transmission. We still will be sending out electric bills, we still will be taking care of all outages and we'll still have the excellent customer service as far as anything concerning your electricity in your house. The only difference is instead of generating 30 percent of our power and buying 70% from Duke, now we'll be buying 100% from Duke until we arrange something different with them."