Republicans shine a light and sound the alarm as Sherrill, BPU, and JCP&L go dark.

New Jersey families spent the holiday in the dark. Republicans put boots on the ground in their towns. The governor, the BPU, and the monopoly we're forced to pay all had somewhere better to be.

If you live in JCP&L territory, you already know how the weekend went. The storm rolled through Friday night. The lights went out. The refrigerator went warm, the well pump went dead, and the house climbed into the 90s with a holiday’s worth of food spoiling on the counter. You called the utility and got a text code and an outage map. Some of you were told your power might return Thursday — nearly a week in the dark, in a heat wave, in the most densely populated state in America, in the year 2026.

Now here is the part nobody in a position of authority wants to say out loud: there is really nothing you can do about it.

You did not choose JCP&L. You cannot fire JCP&L. Your electric company is handed to you by your street address, like a tax bracket, and the bill arrives whether the power does or not.

So when the storm hits and the grid folds, who actually works for you? Judging by this weekend: your mayor, your first responders, the linemen in the buckets — and a handful of Republican legislators who spent their holiday doing the jobs the governor, the utility, and the state’s own regulator apparently consider optional. Everyone else with real power over your life had somewhere better to be.

This all happened, of course, while Gov. Sherrill partied it up all weekend with New York Governor Kathy Hochul and NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani in celebration of Independence Day. Yes, the same holiday that celebrates the horrible, no good, racist, sexist, insert-term-here-phobic country their party routinely trashes. Perhaps before they toasted they acknowledged that they were celebrating on stolen land, all while residents were the ones actually robbed of any opportunity to celebrate the country they actually love.

One thing was made exceptionally clear: Gov. Sherrill and the elite class do not care about you. They never did. The below is proof.

PAGING GOVERNOR SHERRILL…

Governor Mikie Sherrill surfaced once. On July 4, she held a briefing, recited the restoration numbers, and assured everyone the state was “moving really, really quickly,” per WABC. Then she went dark. No update Saturday night. None Sunday. Her public schedule for Monday was blank. No tour of the damage. No State of Emergency — the routine declaration that speeds resources, unlocks mutual aid, and opens the door to federal help. Three days into a mass outage in dangerous heat, the chief executive of New Jersey had nothing on her calendar and nothing to say.

The state Republican Party said the obvious thing. Chairwoman Christine Giordano Hanlon called the governor missing in action and demanded the emergency declaration — a logistical tool, she noted, not a political favor, the kind of thing a governor signs on reflex when her constituents are sweating in the dark.

“Families are still sitting in the dark while Governor Sherrill sits on the sidelines.”
— Christine Hanlon, NJGOP Chairwoman

She wasn’t alone. Assemblywoman Vicky Flynn (R-Monmouth) told New Jersey 101.5 she was frankly surprised the governor had neither toured the damage nor declared an emergency, and said a gubernatorial presence in the hardest-hit towns “would go a long way.” Assemblyman Rob Clifton (R-Monmouth), in a statement to Central Jersey Newswire, put the leadership failure in plain terms:

“Governor Sherrill and her administration have shown a troubling lack of visible leadership and clear communication to the public.”

— Asm. Rob Clifton, Assistant GOP Minority Leader, statement to CJN

And here is the detail that ought to follow this governor around. She opened her term in January by declaring a “State of Emergency on Utility Costs” — executive order, signing ceremony, Day One promise kept, the full production. A paper emergency about your bill got the ceremony. A real emergency — actual families, actual heat, actual food rotting in dead refrigerators — got a long weekend of silence.

NJGOP Hanlon aptly called out Sherill’s policy of Mikie-come-lately and playing politics with a state emergency:

“The Governor shouldn’t have to be prompted by legislators to take emergency action….a State of Emergency isn’t about politics. It’s about getting communities the resources they need as quickly as possible. Every hour matters when families are without electricity, air conditioning, refrigeration and, in many areas, even running water.”

— Christine Hanlon, NJGOP Chairwoman

Assemblyman Paul Kanitra (R-Ocean) set the governor’s silence against the administration’s actual spending priorities, and found the ledger damning:

“New Jersey handed out close to a billion dollars of your money to string power lines out to offshore wind farms that were never built. Meanwhile the grid my constituents actually rely on is held together with duct tape and prayers. Two hundred thousand people lost power this week because for years Trenton chased windmills and forgot all about the wires.”

— Asm. Paul Kanitra (R-Ocean)

A GRID THAT FOLDS IN A THUNDERSTORM

Understand what actually hit the state Friday. Not a hurricane. Not a blizzard. A summer thunderstorm, with gusts JCP&L itself clocked at 67 miles per hour. That was enough to cut power to more than 200,000 of its customers, kill a 41-year-old driver under a falling limb, and shut down NJ Transit’s Morris & Essex and Gladstone Branch lines straight into Monday’s commute. By Monday morning, roughly 55,000 homes were still dark across Hunterdon, Monmouth, Morris, Sussex, and Union counties.

Sixty-seven mile-an-hour wind is a bad afternoon, not an act of God. And nearly fourteen years after Superstorm Sandy was supposed to be the wake-up call that fixed all of this, the grid still cannot survive one. That is not weather. That is a policy choice, repeated every budget cycle. The people who warned about it are on the record — including Senator Declan O’Scanlon (R-Monmouth), who spent the weekend running constituent triage out of his own office and posted this:

“Our power grid must be upgraded, strengthened, and properly maintained… There is much to unpack in post-mortem, including more accurate & useful restoration estimates.”

— Sen. Declan O’Scanlon (R-Monmouth), via Facebook

Clifton has been saying the same thing, and made a point of noting this was no surprise to anyone paying attention:

“This is not a new issue. I have long warned that we must make urgent investments in our infrastructure to build true redundancy and resilience. The lessons from Superstorm Sandy should have been learned years ago.”

— Asm. Rob Clifton (R-Monmouth), statement to CJN

Assemblyman Gregory McGuckin (R-Ocean) asked the question every ratepayer was thinking, and refused to accept the weather as an excuse:

“A thunderstorm in July at the Jersey Shore is hardly unprecedented — how is it that only JCP&L’s facilities can’t seem to handle it?… Let’s face it, this wasn’t a drone attack on our power grid, it was a thunderstorm. How and why does this continue to happen?”

— Asm. Gregory McGuckin (R-Ocean)

JCP&L: JERSEY’S CONSISTENT POWER LETDOWN

A weak grid is one problem. A utility that can’t tell anyone what’s happening on it is another — and on that count, JCP&L delivered a master class over the weekend. Mayors couldn’t get straight answers. Restoration estimates slid. The people fielding panicked calls from residents were left guessing right alongside them. Flynn, who spent the weekend on the phone with local officials, laid it out:

“The biggest takeaway so far is that communication during this storm restoration must improve. Monmouth and Ocean County mayors and local officials expressed significant frustration that communication has deteriorated, especially considering the lessons learned after Superstorm Sandy.

Our local elected officials are the ones fielding the calls, emails, and concerns from residents around the clock… they need better, more timely information from JCP&L to do that effectively.”

— Asw. Vicky Flynn (R-Monmouth), via Facebook

O’Scanlon put the same failure more bluntly. When your constituents are baking in the dark and the utility’s answer is a shrug and a moving target, that is not a plan:

“Communication between government and utility companies must improve. When the safety of New Jerseyans is at stake, ‘hurry up and wait’ is not an acceptable policy.”

— Sen. Declan O’Scanlon (R-Monmouth), via Facebook

Clifton, again, named the party responsible without flinching: “The utility companies have to dramatically improve their information sharing to both municipal officials and the impacted residents they serve.” And the mayors — the officials with no jurisdiction over JCP&L but all of the blame — were blunter still. Point Pleasant Borough Mayor Robert A. Sabosik didn’t hedge:

“I don’t blame the storms. I blame the company… My town is still on a grid operating with equipment that is decades old and failing. Three days later, we still have residents with no power and receive unreliable information. They promise upgrades and we never see them. For the amount of money our residents pay, they are seeing no return on investment.”

— Mayor Robert A. Sabosik, (R) Point Pleasant Borough

That is the recurring theme every honest official kept circling back to — not that a storm happened, but that the company charged with keeping the lights on couldn’t manage to keep anyone informed while they were off.

A MONOPOLY YOU’RE FORCED TO PAY

Now ask the question that ties it all together: if JCP&L is this bad at it, why don’t its customers simply take their business elsewhere? Because they can’t. Electric distribution in New Jersey is a government-assigned monopoly. Your delivery utility is fixed by your address. A JCP&L customer cannot switch to PSE&G, cannot shop for a better-run company, cannot do the one thing that disciplines every other business in America — walk away. It is a captive market of 1.2 million households, owned by an Akron, Ohio conglomerate, FirstEnergy Corp.

And those captive customers are footing the bill for the fixes. Regulators have signed off on more than $202.5 million in ratepayer-funded grid upgrades through JCP&L’s EnergizeNJ program. So you are paying, on every single bill, for reliability you demonstrably did not receive this weekend. In a competitive market that’s a scandal that ends careers. In a protected monopoly, it’s a Tuesday.

Assemblyman McGuckin — whose Ocean County district has some of the longest outage histories in the state — refused to file this under bad luck. He called it what it is:

“This isn’t a one-off storm story. This is JCP&L’s business model… JCP&L keeps treating four- and five-day outages during heat emergencies like the cost of doing business. It has to stop.”
— Asm. Gregory McGuckin (R-Ocean)

The mayors who take the blame for a company they can’t control see the same thing. Bay Head Mayor William Curtis traced the problem straight to the out-of-state owner:

“The infrastructure is abysmal, and I don’t see any improvements in sight. Local mayors get the blame, but we have no jurisdiction over JCP&L. They get their marching orders out of Ohio by people who in my opinion don’t give our area much of an afterthought. Electric bills are going up, up and up and we are seeing nothing out of it.”

— Mayor William Curtis, (R) Bay Head

The one official who is supposed to stand between the captive ratepayer and the out-of-state monopoly is the regulator — which is exactly where Assemblyman Alex Sauickie (R-Ocean) pointed:

“The board’s job is to protect ratepayers and make sure New Jerseyans receive safe, adequate and reliable service at reasonable rates.”
— Asm. Alex Sauickie (R-Ocean)

THE WATCHDOG THAT WROTE A MEMO

Which brings us to the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities — the agency that exists for one reason and one reason only: because you can’t fire your utility, so the state is supposed to do it for you. Here is how that worked out.

Eleven months before this storm, in an August 2025 order, the BPU found that JCP&L had failed to meet New Jersey’s minimum reliability standards for three consecutive years — with outage frequency and restoration times getting worse every single year, a ten-year high across nearly every category of outage, and no demonstrated evidence of the inspection and maintenance programs the law flatly requires. In plain numbers: in 2024 the average JCP&L customer lost power nearly twice and waited more than two and a half hours each time — over three hours up north. The board wrote all of it down. It found the failures. It issued the order.

And then the Fourth of July arrived and tested whether any of that paperwork meant anything. Fifty-five thousand households got the answer Monday morning. Sauickie is now demanding the board do its job in public — a full reliability hearing with sworn testimony from BPU officials, utility executives, emergency managers, mayors, and independent grid experts, plus mandatory written after-action reports from every utility that failed. He framed the stakes exactly where they belong:

“This is an accountability issue, not just a weather story… Before forcing families to pay more for new experimental energy mandates, the governor and the BPU should prove they can keep the lights on.”

— Asm. Alex Sauickie (R-Ocean)

Kanitra took the board apart from the other direction — for approving a fraction of the fix and then reaching for penalties when the underfunded grid did exactly what an underfunded grid does:

“The BPU approved barely a fifth of the plan to fix this grid, and then had the nerve to threaten fines because reliability is bad. You cannot starve the system and then punish it for starving. And the people who actually get punished are the families in Monmouth and Ocean sitting in the dark with the fridge going warm.”

— Asm. Paul Kanitra (R-Ocean)

A regulator that documents three years of failure and then presides over a fourth is not a watchdog. It’s a filing cabinet.

THE UNHOLY TRINITY OF TRENTON

Add it up, because the officials above already have. A governor who declares an emergency over utility bills, but not over an actual utility failure. A grid that folds under a routine thunderstorm nearly fourteen years after Sandy. A monopoly that missed the state’s minimum reliability bar running while billing its captive customers for upgrades. And a regulator that saw it all coming, in writing, and did nothing anyone can point to.

Kanitra and McGuckin, as most republicans and those with common sense and a sense of service are doing, are demanding answer. The 10th district duo traced the whole thing back to the one place it always ends - your wallet:

“Every single month the state skims money off your electric bill for so-called societal benefits, then sweeps billions of it into NJ Transit and budget holes. $2.6 billion gone, and not one power line hardened, not one tree crew sent out… Every ratepayer in New Jersey got robbed.”

— Asm. Paul Kanitra (R-Ocean)

Your power will come back on. The crews will see to that, and they have earned every word of thanks they’re getting - but the system that left you in the dark bills you every month, at 1.2 million addresses that never got a vote, and it still maintains its spot in the unholy trinity of Trenton politicians, favored corporations, and their (supposed) regulatory agencies. The only people currently asking what those families are paying for are the on the right side - literally and politically.

Everyone else in charge is counting on you to forget this by the next storm. The record above is a pretty good argument for why you shouldn’t.
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Edit: a previous version of this story accidentally referred to Assemblyman McGuckin as Senator McGuckin

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