Butler Township Groundbreaking webButler Township officials hosted a groundbreaking on Wednesday at the future home of the Butler Township municipal building and police station on Site 11 in the CAN DO Corporate Center in Drums.

The $4 million building project includes a 13,500-square-foot facility that will house Butler Township’s police station, detention area, administration building and zoning office and an additional 4,300-square-foot police storage garage. Township officials expect to move into the new facility in February of 2018.

Butler Township officials finalized the purchase of the five-acre lot on Site 11 in the Corporate Center late last year. Butler Township was looking for a location that would help it better serve the township’s growing population in terms of emergency response time and convenience when conducting municipal business.

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PPL Electric Utilities continues to add smart grid automation on its system to increase reliability.

Smart grid improvements have been a major factor in allowing the utility to reduce the number of outages by 30 percent since 2007. The next five years are expected to bring another 15 percent improvement.

The company reports about 4,600 smart grid switches have been installed across its service area since 2012, when the first smart grid pilot project launched in the Harrisburg area. Now, there are smart grid devices nearly everywhere on the utility’s system which covers all or part of 29 counties in central and eastern Pennsylvania.

Humboldt Park Association members learned about the Greater Hazleton Chamber of Commerce’s 2017 Wage and Salary survey and Service Electric Cablevision’s business packages for phone, high-speed internet and cable during the association’s recent meeting at McCann School of Business and Technology in the Humboldt Industrial Park.