68 The Next Hundred Years Commercial electric Twenty-plus-year employee George Bonacci performs all the commercial electric work for the company with just one helper. He started his career at P&CG in 2004 installing Verizon 5G antennas on wooden poles with the Street Lighting Division. For a steady base of more than 50 customers, his work today encompasses a broad range—anything from changing outlets to wiring entire sections of buildings. Sometimes it means running electric services or panel box work. On other days, he’s working on parking lot lighting or making electrical repairs to cranes. George considers himself to be an electrical mechanic, working with his hands to take things apart and reassemble them. A persistent troubleshooter, he attributes his widespread knowledge to those who came before him— mentors who took the time to teach him and others how to do the work and, more importantly, how to do it safely. He's doing the same with the next generation: Connor Edwards, our frst employee to complete our electrician apprentice- ship program, trained under George for fve years. The bucket van George drives is the only one in the feet. It’s the best tool for the job, he says, because it lifts him to the top of utility poles while keeping his tools and equipment safe and dry. Supporting our own growth The Industrial Electric Division is central to P&CG’s expansion. We designed and installed the electrical infrastructure for the new Avon Valley plant in 2015. We provided all the AC electrical work for our solar farm in 2019. (See Environmental Stewardship, page 157, for more information.) We’ve been busy at the Scottsville campus, where we upgraded the electric to bring power to Building 12 and added individual meters to monitor electricity usage for each building. We also built the infrastructure to bring electricity to future buildings as the campus expands. We installed an emergency backup generator and brought fber optic cables to the new corporate headquarters building in 2024. As part of our commitment to investing in talent, we cross-train employees from the Street Lighting Division, which spurs their confdence as valuable contributors. With our wide geographic spread, having more electrically trained employees on staf allows us to dispatch skilled workers from locations closer to the emergency, which decreases response time and restores power to consumers faster. We also have two Department of Labor-approved apprenticeship programs for electricians and skilled construction craft laborers. The division now has four master electricians, seven journeymen, a dozen medium- voltage employees, two project managers, an admin, a driver, and a 10,000-square-foot warehouse to store job materials at Maple Street. Joseph Calcagno, who joined as an estimator/assistant project manager in 2020, has played an integral part in helping Michael grow the business. Delegation is the name of the game, Michael says, as the business continues growing. On September 4, 1882, Thomas Edison would turn on the generators at Pearl Street Station, in Lower Manhattan, activating America’s frst power grid. Human beings were on the path to total electrical addiction. – David Koepp, Aurora
