By Christy Scannell
SDUN Senior Editor
In 2005, Talmadge resident Chuck Kaminski received a letter from the City of San Diego that the utility companies would be undergrounding his neighborhood’s power and communication lines. The letter invited residents to attend an information session in Balboa Park.
“When I got there, I saw that the design (for the utility boxes) had been done and that all three boxes would be on my front yard—all three,” Kaminski said about the SDG&E, AT&T and Cox Communications transformer boxes.
Unhappy with the boxes’ placement, he talked with representatives that night and also made numerous calls to the city and the utilities. Eventually, he was able to reach a project manager who agreed to meet at Kaminski’s Norma Drive property, where they figured out how to place the boxes in a less obtrusive location that still met the utilities’ needs. Kaminski also advised the manager on a trenching idea that required less disruption to his yard.
It is exactly that call to action that David Moty, vice-chair of the Kensington-Talmadge Planning Group, a city advisory committee on land use and planning, hopes to convey to residents in neighborhoods slated for undergrounding.
“Everyone thinks ‘undergrounding’ means everything goes underground, and it doesn’t,” Moty said. “As I told (District 3 Councilmember) Todd Gloria, ‘This is a slow-moving train wreck that’s going to move through your district.’”
A Talmadge resident, Moty said the first two phases of undergrounding there—the neighborhood is sectioned into three utility districts—have created ongoing problems due to the utility boxes’ placement, such as parking loss, hampered access for pedestrians and graffiti.
“It’s like they are taking the visual clutter from up in the air and putting it down where you walk,” he said.
To rid neighborhoods of power lines and poles, utilities place the lines below ground, requiring transformer boxes every eight to 15 homes depending on demand. A multi-year project funded through utility bill surcharges, undergrounding begins in a neighborhood when the City Council designates a utility district, followed by about two years of design and planning at the city’s Engineering and Capital Projects Department. Once the utilities convert all the lines to underground in a district, the poles and overhead wires are removed.
Labib Qasem, a program manager for the city’s undergrounding program, said he is sympathetic to residents’ concerns about the utility boxes but their location in the public right of way—usually the parkway between the sidewalk and curb—is the best solution.
“If you do a project like this and try to get easements (onto private property), you take a two-year project and turn it into five or 10 years,” he said. “When we do the map, the locations are coordinated with [the three utilities] so they make sense for the contractor to build.”
San Diego Uptown News asked Qasem to view pictures of utility boxes installed in Talmadge, such as a site where the box was placed directly on the sidewalk rather than the parkway, requiring a new sidewalk to be poured over the parkway. Another photo showed an SDG&E box in a specially created stone cove that did not incorporate the AT&T and Cox boxes.
“I don’t know why those were done that way,” he said after looking at the two photos. “That is very unusual.”
A third picture he reviewed showed an exceptionally large transformer box in front of a Monroe Avenue house, nearly blocking the front view.
“In each big job there are one or two of this kind,” he said about the bulky unit. “They don’t happen that often, though.”
Although Talmadge resident Moty said his neighbors are worried that the large boxes—particularly like the Monroe Avenue example—could affect home values, real estate agent Afton Miller said that’s not realistic.
“As unattractive as those (utility) boxes are, that’s minor compared to how unattractive the poles are. The truth of the matter is it really makes a difference to take them down. Once the undergrounding is complete it will increase home values,” she said.
“The best scenario for the highest value is no utility poles and no boxes,” Miller said. “I wish the city would put the boxes underground but the cost is probably exorbitant.”
Allison Zaragoza, a spokesperson for SDG&E, said undergrounding the boxes is a common request from residents but not an action the company is willing to take.
“It’s more cost effective for our ratepayers to have the utility boxes above ground,” she said. “It would require more maintenance for them to be underground. If something were to happen it would require more work to go underground and it also creates safety issues for us.”
Not everyone in Talmadge and Kensington opposes the utility boxes. In Kensington, where undergrounding has been delayed until 2011 as residents seek to form a maintenance assessment district for more input on design and placement, resident Bill Bamberger said his neighbors are looking forward to the transition.
“I’m convinced that the vast majority of residents in Kensington support undergrounding as soon as we can get it,” he said. “We’ll get all new infrastructure replacing our 80- and 90-year-old power lines and telephone lines. Another major benefit is we have a lot of high power lines running through our canyons and they pose a fire threat so we’d certainly like to get those wires out of the canyons.”
Bamberger said he trusts that Kensington residents will have an opportunity to give input about where the utility boxes are positioned but he would like to see the city and the utilities implement policies to help achieve a satisfactory outcome.
“I agree that we need to be very careful about how [the utility boxes] are placed,” he said. “We should make sure that they are not in places that detract from the beauty of our neighborhood. We’re looking forward to having it done here and having it done right.”
Although North Park isn’t scheduled to begin undergrounding until 2016, the North Park Planning Committee is taking precautionary action on the issue. The group formed a Utility Box Task Force earlier this year to explore undergrounding with the goal of understanding the project’s impact.
“At a minimum there should be some standards as to where they’re placed, how large they can be and their design,” said Cheryl Dye, a task force member.
The task force presented its findings last month to the larger committee, which voted to ask Councilmember Gloria to put the item on the agenda of the City Council’s Land Use and Housing subcommittee, which he chairs. The motion also asked that he meet with the task force and that the item be added to other city committee agendas, such as the Historical Resources Board.
“We want to encourage collaboration between everyone in the city so we can develop some sort of plan that would serve as a model for how this can proceed,” Dye said. “I don’t think anyone is against undergrounding; we just want to do it in a way that meets the public interest.”
The task force also studied utility boxes installed outside specific project zones, such as those installed for new businesses and service upgrades.
“We are concerned about the proliferation of utility boxes cropping up in front of business and homes,” she said, explaining that a box placed in a public right of way requires no notification to residents or business owners.
“We were already in the middle of opening. So we settled for less than what we were expecting,” Bucci said.
That “less” meant delaying plans for an outdoor dining area that would allow patrons to drink wine, which according to city code requires a barrier between the patio and sidewalk. Bucci had to hire an architect to create a special design that would allow space for the utility boxes and the sidewalk, deleting two feet and six seats from his outdoor eating area. The plan was approved Sept. 3—nearly a year after Pappalecco opened.
When asked how that wait has affected his business, Bucci shook his head.
“I feel like an idiot,” he said. “It’s not fair. It’s ridiculous that we have to go through all this.”
None of these issues are lost on City Councilmember Todd Gloria, who has been following the Talmadge undergrounding as well as the reactions of other neighborhoods in his district.
“This one-size-fits-all approach may not fit District 3,” he said about the placement of utility boxes in sidewalks and near curbs. “The age of our communities and the need for pedestrian access is more substantial here than it might be in other parts of the city that have been undergrounded.”
Gloria cited the curbside location of some utility boxes, which require bollards or “crash poles” to protect the transformer boxes, as especially problematic because they potentially reduce on-street parking in Uptown neighborhoods already suffering from parking shortages.
“We’ve gone to the utilities and dialogued about ways to moderate the effects,” he said. “We always want to challenge them about ways to do it better.”
Gloria conceded, though, that it is still unclear how much latitude the city has to issue requirements because the utilities are regulated at the state level. He said city staff is continuing to examine what kinds of modifications they can require. The outcome in Talmadge will serve as a model for what works and what doesn’t.
“The good news for Talmadge is that they were first (to have utilities undergrounded) but it’s also the bad news for them,” he said. “My hope is we can take the lessons learned from Talmadge and use them in places who will be getting undergrounding next.”
Talmadge resident Moty said that desire is why he contacted other Uptown planning groups about undergrounding.
“I don’t think we can impose results but in the process we can guide it to different results,” he said. “It’s not that we’re against undergrounding. We just want the (utility) companies to consider what they are doing and how that might affect people’s homes and lives.”
City program manager Qasem said there is one request residents shouldn’t make of the city or utilities: to shift a planned utility box to another property.
“There is flexibility but we won’t move it to some neighbor you don’t like—that just wouldn’t be fair,” he said.
