{"Body Text Edit"/}National Grid has begun work on electric lines that supply towns that have suffered several outages in the past year. In areas including Worcester, Maryland and Summit, people have had to deal with several bouts of lost service.
We're glad to see that the company is trying to do as much of its work as possible when the lines are live, so further outages won't occur. We're also glad to see the company taking a look at a variety of possible issues with the lines.
However, we feel preventative measures should have been taken before the series of outages. Or, at the very least, the issue should have been addressed a few outages ago.
Customers have been seriously inconvenienced, including people such as Worcester resident Mark Vensak, who said his service has been out so much in the past three years that he's had to buy a generator. We're sure he's not the only one who has had to resort to such a measure.
We hope that in the future, National Grid will take a more-proactive approach to its services.
{"Headline24"/}State must make amends to nonprofits
{"Body Text Edit"/}We applaud the efforts of State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli for urging state agencies to distribute funds to nonprofits on time and proposing that they must pay interest when they don't.
New York is awash in money _ $14.6 billion _ that is not being paid to the 30,764 agencies in question, 70 of them in Chenango, Delaware and Otsego.
Nonprofits need all the support they can get, and with the economy in such a dire state, this is probably the worst time in recent memory for these groups not to be getting what's owed them.
The agencies are being forced into borrowing the money, and are put into an even deeper financial hole because they have to pay interest on what's borrowed.
This problem has a trickle-down effect to community members who need the support and services these nonprofits provide, a situation made worse by the fact that this is happening in a time when people are in greater need of aid.
There is already a high level of disgust with the state, given the recent political antics in Albany, and New York has been struggling on other fronts to keep people in the state as well.
We're dismayed to see yet more of the state floundering on its responsibilities to its residents, and we hope that DiNapoli's proposed regulations are put into effect soon.
