Visitors and professionals who work in Port Huron may soon be able to plug in their electric vehicles at stations downtown.
It’s a new amenity city officials said they hope will prove an economic driver at several stations on in lots on both sides of the Black River as they work on contract details to present to City Council by sometime in October.
“You put any electrification stations, and if someone goes to dinner, they can plug in. That may be helpful,” City Manager James Freed said this week. “If someone knows they work in an office downtown (and there is) a charging station a block away.”
Council officials first got a brief from Freed via email earlier this month — pointing to Hage Automotive and Red e Charging as potential partners to install charging facilities. He updated members of the Downtown Development Authority Tuesday.
So far, the administrator said they’re identifying a lot adjacent to McMorran Boulevard and the lots off East Quay and West Quay streets, as well as another off of Pine Street and in front of the Harrington Inn as sites for earlier stations.
But he added they could install more down the road if successful and as “people are more comfortable with electrified vehicles.”
On Wednesday, Cynthia Cutright, the city’s DDA director, said she hadn’t heard much from downtown businesses about the need for charging stations to accommodate electric vehicles.
Still, she said she was glad the city was thinking ahead and getting in early, believing it’ll prove to have more immediate and long-term benefits bringing people to the central business district.
“I know, at some point, we were going to have to be looking at these stations. We know a lot of downtowns may be waiting for electric vehicles to become a little more popular,” Cutright said. “… I think within the next year or so, we’re going to be glad we moved forward with this maybe sooner than other communities.”
Downtown charging stations to come ‘at no cost to the city,’ official says
Freed said legally, the city couldn’t put in charging stations allowing everyone to pull in and plug in, comparing it to “buying a gas pump and putting it out there to say, ‘Everyone gets free gas.’”
Instead, he said they were working on third-party entities providing a ground lease for turn-key operations that were more like vending machines — the companies charging vehicle owners for the service.
“This is at no cost to the city, no installation costs and operational costs,” Freed said. “There will be some type of revenue sharing, but to be quite frank, I don’t want to make money on it. … I’m afraid if we say, ‘You’ve got to give us 30, 40% of your revenue,’ they won’t want (to invest).
“Where if you say, ‘You keep the overwhelming majority of your profits,’ maybe we can get all of these charging stations installed. So, we’ll start rolling those out. By the time we ink the contract, it’s about 60 days to get those installed. So, we should have charging stations at some point this fall.”
Contact Jackie Smith at (810) 989-6270 or jssmith@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @Jackie20Smith.