Tea Gardens Hotel/Motel proprietor Lee Anderson is calling for a drastic overhaul of the town's electricity supply.
Ms Anderson, who pays thousands of dollars in electricity bills to Country Energy every month, is sick and tired of putting up with constant black outs and brown outs during peak trade time, a problem that was supposed to have been amended two years ago.
"We had two browns out at Easter, one on Good Friday night and the other on Easter Saturday night, both times when the hotel was full," Ms Anderson said.
"We had to turn people away, which meant a huge loss of revenue at a time when we make most of our money leading up to the winter months."
Ms Anderson said continued loss of business could have dire consequences for the hotel and its employees.
"In the past it was something we lived with, but it's becoming insupportable," she said.
"We're on tender hooks as to whether we'll be able to operate.
"There are 30 people employed here. That's 30 families that rely on this business to live. It's getting beyond a joke."
The situation has become so bad that Ms Anderson has been forced to consider purchasing a back-up generator for the business, which also includes a restaurant, bottle shop and the motel.
"We're a private business and we have no back-up generator like the Golf Club or Bowling Club," she said.
"We can't afford it and why should we have to purchase it anyway when we are paying all this money for electricity?"
Of particular concern for Ms Anderson is the cost of repairing refrigeration facilities in the kitchen and bar.
"Every time we have one of these brown outs the till dies, the fridges die and our glycol system in the bar dies," she said.
"We have to call Raisbeck, our fridge people, up from Newcastle every time it happens and it costs a couple of hundred dollars to fix, that's not to mention the food wastage that occurs when it happens."
Ms Anderson, who is also president of the Tea Gardens/Hawks Nest Chamber of Commerce, said it was already hard enough being a small business operator without the added pressure of dealing with constant black outs and brown outs. She said it was becoming increasingly hard for small business to compete with the larger corporations and continue to employ people from within the local community.
"The government is supposedly pouring enormous amounts of cash into small business, but we're still losing a lot of tourism to cheap package deals," she said.
"We're struggling to survive and give local people jobs to keep them in town."
Country Energy has assured Ms Anderson that the problem will be fixed within the next few weeks, with work currently underway on the Underball Project, an initiative that will link electricity sources from Tea Gardens and Hawks Nest.
"There are currently two sources of electricity supply in Tea Gardens," regional general manager for Country Energy Andrew Latta said.
"This new project brings another electricity source into the community and helps share the load."
Mr Latta said he expected a substantial improvement once work on the project was finished.
He said he expected the instances of brown out occurring in the Tea Gardens area to decrease markedly.
Mr Latta will meet with Ms Anderson in the next fortnight to try and help resolve any further issues she may have.
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