A JEA plan to build a nine-mile power line connecting its Greenland Energy Center in the Bayard area to the Bartram substation along Race Track Road is creating a negative buzz among some nearby residents.
“I feel like we should have been notified, we should have had a say,” Stephanie McKinney of Bartram Springs asserted Tuesday. McKinney says a forum that was casually billed as a ‘public chat’ last Thursday at Bartram Springs Elementary School came with virtually no notice.
“I’m on the PTA board and our PTA president shared a notice, ‘JEA is going to be having an informal community chat’, is sort of how it was labeled.
“I wasn’t aware of any projects,” she said, noting that she couldn’t find a babysitter on the one-day notice she was given.
Now she’s quite aware. The JEA project (click: https://www.jea.com/us1) will give many homes in the Bartram vicinity a potential backup source of power in the event of outages. But McKinney and many others – she began an online petition after the sparsely attended meeting that had garnered nearly 650 signatures as of Tuesday – are concerned about multiple negatives.
“The hum that the high-voltage lines create,” Brad Bridges began, “plus the unsightliness of having them at the back view of our house.”
JEA says the poles would range in height between 102 feet and 126 feet – much taller and closer to Bridges’ home than the utility poles that currently line the east side of the same stretch of U.S. 1.
Bridges and his family live so close to U.S. 1 that they always hear the rumble of trains and often can see the lights and at least the tops of rail cars as they pass. He and his wife Kara say they’re not the only ones suddenly very worried about property values.
“I’ve heard a whole lot of people being very upset and worried that their property values will drop tremendously,” Kara Bridges said. "People are panicking”.
Kara Bridges says she, too, got word of last Thursday’s meeting at the eleventh hour.
“I read a lot of social media and I stay in touch with local news and folks in the neighborhood that way, and I do not remember seeing it advertised at all until the day of.”
One further concern is potential health effects of living so close to an electromagnetic field.
“[Within] a thousand-foot radius, people have experienced more health problems, especially infertility,” McKinney claimed.
A press release by JEA counters such concern, reading:
“Studies have shown that there are no increased health risks attributed to electric transmission lines that meet the electric and magnetic fields set forth by Chapter 62-814 of the Florida Administrative Code. The plans for this proposed electric transmission line project comply with the limits set forth by these required State of Florida rules and regulations.”
Kara Bridges isn’t quite convinced. “I don’t know how true these issues are but I would have concern about health issues,” she said.
Although JEA wasn’t available for direct comment Tuesday evening, First Coast News spoke with a homeowners association president in Bartram Springs, who said he remains hopeful that there will be at least one more – and better publicized – public forum allowing residents to ask questions, voice concerns, and offer suggestions.
If you have questions for JEA, the company urges you to contact its Project Outreach team at 904-665-7500 orprojectoutreach@jea.com.