Not all poles make the cut

BALBOA PENINSULA — When Pat Hlifka walks out her front door on Vilelle Place, the first thing she sees is a crazily tilted utility pole loaded with wires.

She worries the pole might fall on nearby homes, so you might think she’d embrace plans to bury utility lines and remove poles in her neighborhood, even though it would cost her nearly $17,000.

But Hlifka, along with the owners of about 100 other parcels that were part of a proposed utility line burial district, voted to kill the project last week. For Hlifka, it wasn’t worth it because the leaning pole of Vilelle Place wasn’t going to be taken down.

Welcome to the unusual process of getting utility lines put underground. Homeowners who want to remove poles for safety and looks are the ones who get the process started, but the project Hlifka would have been part of is the second in Newport Beach this year that’s been voted down by those same homeowners.

Those two failures have Newport Beach officials asking to examine the process to try to improve it, and not just because they lost money paying for engineering of projects that won’t take place. The peninsula project cost the city $104,500.

“We’ve now had two train wrecks in a row on these underground districts,” Councilman Michael Henn said. “The fundamental problem is that the costs have escalated fantastically over the last three years. I don’t understand why.”

How utility line burial projects get done is complex. It involves homeowners, the city and utility companies. Residents get a project started by circulating petitions. If at least 60% of property owners in the proposed district want utilities put underground, the city will front the cost of engineering for the project.

Once property owners know what they’ll be charged for the work, they get the chance to vote on whether the project should go ahead. Their costs can range from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands.

Newport has been handling utility line burial projects since the late 1980s, and most of them go smoothly. A project in Newport Shores, which wrapped up earlier this year, has homeowners pleased, said Kennie Jo Rizzo, vice-president of the community association.

“It is expensive, but we’re thrilled, absolutely thrilled,” she said. “We couldn’t have done anything better for our community.”

That said, the project took a lot of work and time. Rizzo said it was 10 years between circulating petitions and seeing the neighborhood pole-free.

The time it takes to do a project was one of the problems with the plan for Hlifka’s neighborhood. The petitions first went around in 2001, and construction costs have gone up across the board since then, said Patrick Arciniega, an associate civil engineer for the city.

“A lot of things have changed over the years. Utilities are telling us that everything has to be built at prevailing wage, which wasn’t the case a number of years ago,” he said.

Last week, peninsula residents complained to the city council about how their district was set up — they didn’t think all the assessments were fair, and it would have required Hlifka to pay even though her house fronts a street that’s not part of the district and the lines that would be buried don’t serve her property.

“I want the [lines put] underground — I just didn’t like being told, ‘OK, you’re going to pay but you’re not going to get anything,” she said.

The engineering was done by a hired firm whose representative told the council last week that designing the districts is more of an art than a science.

Henn wants to look into those problems and see if the city can find ways to get the projects done faster, make sure property owners have a fair chance to question their assessment and get a response, and help set up utility districts that make sense. The council will discuss the issue at a future study session.

If city leaders can clean up the process, Henn said, “Hopefully we’ll have fewer people voting against it because they think they were inequitably treated.”