By Sunayana Prabhu
HOLMDEL – Township officials and residents have been entangled in arguments over the tall utility poles Jersey Central Power & Light (JCP&L) has been installing in neighborhoods. While everyone demands undisrupted electricity to support growing needs like electric vehicles, not many are happy about the towering structures on the company’s grid. Township officials have said that the “oversized poles” are industrializing the rural and suburban character of neighborhoods.
The conflict intensified recently after the Holmdel Township Committee voiced its concerns, standing with residents to denounce JCP&L’s plans.
“We are taking a hard line against JCP&L’s disregard for our community. For too long, utility giants have used ‘resiliency’ as a blanket excuse to bypass local standards,” Mayor Rocco Impreveduto said in a township statement May 17. “Holmdel is not a pass-through for corporate convenience, and we will not be silent while our rural and suburban landscape is industrialized.”
JCP&L has been installing the taller poles along Holland Road and Longstreet Road for the past few weeks. Some of those poles are triangular, visibly wider compared to the regular ones that have stood alongside dense tree-lined streets. A few of the new poles have been planted in the front yards of homes on Holland Road, upsetting residents.
Resident Nate Brown said a 6-foot-deep hole was exposed and left open on his property for over 24 hours. He said that for six months he had been asking JCP&L, local police and the township committee what was going on after noticing activity on Roberts Road and seeing “marks and paint” but got “no answers.” The wires “went from the road all the way up my landscaping, smashed my trees, smashed my landscaping bushes, and went into my yard,” Brown said, adding that he has received multiple communications and offers of compensation from JCP&L and from the head of the contracted construction crew, but he has declined them. “It’s not about money, it’s about respect,” he said, and about preserving the reasons he moved to Holmdel from southeastern Ohio – because the town has a “home feel.”
Chris Hoenig, JCP&L spokesperson, said in an email May 18 that the project undertaken in Holmdel is about “enhancing reliability, system flexibility and meeting the needs of the local communities.” According to Hoenig, the work being completed “replaces aging infrastructure, first built in the 1970s, with modern standards that help keep the lights on and meet the growing electric needs of the area now and into the future.”
Impreveduto noted that the project, “much like the Trenton-mandated affordable housing quotas, is being imposed upon Holmdel by an unelected state agency,” he said, adding that JCP&L operates under the “protection of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (BPU), which possesses the power to override local municipal opposition.” The township has “extremely limited avenues for legal recourse,” he said.
“The BPU’s current framework strips power away from the people and hands it to the utilities,” Impreveduto added. “By allowing JCP&L to proceed despite our formal protests, the BPU is failing in its duty to balance utility needs with the rights of the local taxpayers who have to live with these eyesores every day.”
While the township cannot halt work on the JCP&L equipment due to state law limits, “we are going on the offensive in every area where we do have jurisdiction,” Impreveduto said. The township has pushed for strict oversight of cleanup and restoration at installation sites, including fees paid for every removed tree and requiring that JCP&L repairs any damage to rights-of-way or surrounding landscapes. Impreveduto said the township was able to intervene in the initial stages of the project and “saved hundreds of trees that would have otherwise been lost to JCP&L’s indiscriminate cutting.”
Hoenig said JCP&L has been working with Holmdel officials and town leaders throughout this project, including areas such as tree and vegetation management and traffic management. The agency has made “adjustments based on the feedback and concerns brought to us by local leaders,” he said.
Hoenig neither confirmed nor denied the rumors about serving potential data centers in the future, a concern brought up by some residents on social media posts. “This particular project is about enhancing reliability for all of our residential, commercial and industrial customers in this area today and in the future,” Hoenig said.
According to Hoenig the scope of the current project covers 10 miles of power lines between substations in Matawan and Middletown, and the upgrades are taking place in Matawan, Aberdeen, Marlboro, Holmdel and Middletown. “More than 24,500 JCP&L customers will benefit from this project,” he said.
A May 26 township committee meeting where the issue was going to be raised was canceled due to lack of a quorum, according to the township’s notification.
Based on the remaining timeline of the project provided by the township, pole installation work will continue through June 15. Pole installation in residential neighborhoods is now complete. The remaining poles are limited to the area near the Garden State Parkway.
Following June 15, crews will move to Route 34 to begin installing distribution wires. This phase is expected to be finished by late summer, pending weather or emergency delays, according to JCP&L.
No full road closures are expected during the distribution phase. Residents should anticipate alternating traffic patterns on affected roads.
The article originally appeared in the June 4 – 10, 2026 print edition of The Two River Times.
