Elon’s town council has agreed to surge ahead with an EV enthusiast’s proposal to set up a small charging station for electric vehicles on property that belongs to the town.
The council voted 5-to-0 on Monday to let the town’s administrators hammer out an agreement with Gerald Merchant of Greensboro that would allow him to install and maintain the equipment needed to juice up electric vehicles within a town-owned site like the parking lot of Elon’s Beth Schmidt Park.
The council had initially balked at an earlier version of Merchant’s request which members of the town’s municipal staff had presented two weeks ago on behalf of the applicant.
At the time, the town’s staff told the council that Merchant wanted permission to use one parking space near the playground at Beth Schmidt Park to put in the equipment needed to deliver a slow charge to one vehicle at a time. The council, for its part, was not entirely thrilled with this choice of location so close to a children’s play area. Some of its members also recounted horror stories of electric vehicles that had caught fire while they were charging while others saw problems with the 4-hour charge time that the town’s staff attributed to Merchant’s proposed equipment.
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On Monday, Merchant had a chance to put some of these concerns to rest when he and wife Sara made a personal appearance before Elon’s elected official.
During the course of his hour-long conversation with the council, Merchant admitted that he had little more than a passion for electric vehicles to propel his proposal for a new charging station in Elon. The Greensboro resident conceded that he has no prior experience with commercial charging stations but nevertheless saw it as a potential business opportunity for himself since his retirement from a more conventional corporate career.
Merchant went on to evince a degree of flexibility about his proposal that seemed to do much to win over the council to his request. Among other things, he admitted that he is no longer focused strictly on the sort of slow charging equipment which the town’s staff had originally said he hoped to install.
“Initially, we wanted to put in just a basic charger so we could collect data about how many people would go to the park to charge up,” he recalled. “But after further discussions, I am open to a level III charger, which can handle two vehicles, and the charge on it is 30 or 45 minutes.”
Merchant also expressed his willingness to explore locations other than the parking spot near Beth Schmidt Park’s playground. In fact, he confessed that that his first choice had been one of the parking spots near the railroad tracks that pass through Elon’s downtown business district. The town’s staff nevertheless observed that this option would have required a nod from the North Carolina Railroad.
Merchant added that, at this point, he’d rather go with a site at a park than try out other downtown locations that members of the council recommended for their increased convenience or visibility.
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Read the newspaper’s editorial page opinion of the EV charging parking space and other Elon issues: https://alamancenews.com/elons-hodgepodge-of-crazy-ideas/
“I would prefer to move more quickly and do the park,” Merchant replied, “because I think the park would grow on word of mouth. . . But I would like to look at something in the downtown area for another location.”
Merchant also addressed the fears which some council members had previously raised about the fire hazard from EV charging stations.
Two weeks ago, the town’s fire chief Landon Massey had acknowledged this risk, although he conceded that he personally has more experience with gas-powered vehicles igniting. Merchant told the council that the danger of EV-charging fires is not nearly as great when the technology was still in its infancy.
“When they first came out, they had to get the bugs out,” he admitted. “But they’ve been out for a while now and they’ve kept improving.”
Merchant added that his plan is to set up a generic charging station that would serve vehicles not accommodated by most of the other commercial EV stations in or near Elon. He noted that these existing stations are franchised by Tesla, which not only charges property owners for the privilege of handling its vehicles but forbids them from accommodating the vehicles of other EV manufacturers.
Merchant went on to offer the council a profit-sharing arrangement that would allow the municipality to pocket 5 percent of his town take from his proposed charging station. He estimated that, in the first year of operation, the town’s return could range from $478 for a slow-charging Level I station to $1,314 for a Level III setup.
Merchant’s proposal left a lot of unanswered questions for some members of Elon’s town council. Councilman Steve Exum, who is himself an EV enthusiast, wanted more details about the charging station’s maintenance and liability insurance.
Meanwhile, Elon’s mayor pro tem Monti Allision pointed out that the station’s proposed site at Beth Schmidt Park would restrict its availability to the park’s operating hours, which run from sun up to sundown.
“I know this is a pilot program,” the mayor pro tem added. “But I’m not sure I want us to be the first to go with a person who’s learning the trade as we go along. . . I also think if we were going to do something for the town it should be in the downtown area.”
In spite of these objections, other members of the council saw promise in Merchant’s overall plans that convinced them not to short circuit his request over its finer points.
“I think this is a great concept,” councilman Quinn Ray said. “I think this is an opportunity we would want to explore . . . and I’m definitely willing to entertain the concept of somebody investing in our town.”
“We cannot micromanage all of these details,” agreed councilman Randy Orwig. “I think that what we can approve is the concept – which says that this is the way charging stations will be in Elon.”
“One of the first things that we learn in the essentials of municipal government,” concurred Elon’s mayor Emily Sharpe before the council’s 5-to-0 decision to let staff negotiate the details of an agreement with Merchant, “is that we don’t get into the weeds.”
