The city’s Municipal Service Committee will hear a proposal to add a new district to Pasadena’s Underground Utility Program, a little known but mammoth ongoing project to relocate power and communication lines underground which will require centuries to complete and over time cost the city up to $2 billion.
The Pasadena Water and Power Department will tell the Committee Tuesday it wants to add a new Underground Utility District called ‘Florecita’ while updating the status of work progress.
The at-times controversial Underground Utility Program was launched in 1968 to beautify Pasadena by restoring scenic views of the mountains overlooking the city and to reduce electrical outages.
“PWP will provide project status updates on the established underground districts (Raymond and Mountain) and propose the creation of a new underground district (Florecita) to mitigate potential wildfire risk associated with overhead power lines,” according to PWP.
Within the Raymond and Mountain district, moving overhead electricity lines underground along these two UUDs will involve up to 2.6 miles of digging and reinstallation. PWP estimates design work to take about two years, from late 2022 to 2024, while construction work – at least for the Raymond Ave. UUD – could take up to the end of 2027.
PWP is set to spend over $25 million for the Raymond Ave. UUD project, which would install up to 2.02 miles of power lines underground. For the Mountain Street UUD, PWP has set a budget of $10 million for some 0.62 miles of power lines to be installed underground.
PWP is also proposing a Florecita Drive UUD – considered an Extreme Fire Hazard area, where putting overhead lines underground should be a priority. The proposed undergrounding project will cover 0.17 miles and would cost some $1.5 million.
PWP’s presentation will be before the City Council’s Municipal Services Committee which meets Tuesday, July 12 at 4 p.m.
The Underground Utility Program remains on course unchanged, even after it was temporarily derailed by a $3.6 million embezzlement scandal in 2019, which led to a former Pasadena city employee being sentenced to 14 years in prison for siphoning off funds from the Program’s accounts.
Danny Wooten, a former analyst with Pasadena’s Department of Public Works, was convicted in November, 2018 of 53 felony counts, including embezzlement, conflict of interest and misappropriation of public funds. His co-defendant, Tyrone Collins, the owner of Collins Electric, a business through which some of the money was embezzled, was convicted of 20 counts and sentenced to seven years in prison.
Heated discussions in the City Council about the Underground Utility Program followed after the embezzlement scandal came out in the open and again after Wooten and Collins were convicted and sentenced.
In February 2019, then Mayor Terry Tornek and various City Councilmembers fretted over the Underground Utility program’s massive costs, extraordinary time frame, and the troubling notion that future technology could render the project “obsolete” long before its completion during a Council discussion.
A motion to amend the program’s ordinance to not collect the surtax and discontinue the existing underground districts eventually stalled without passage following more than an hour of discussion in the same meeting.
Tornek said that creating the underground districts should be “terminated immediately,” saying that the project was “tremendously complex.” Tornek also called the entire project “extraordinarily expensive at $10-12 million per mile.”
“This is not a number that I find plausible,” he told the Council. ‘It’s not an expense that I think can be justified.”
Tornek did not call for the end of the ongoing utility surtax however, which has been in effect since the mid-1960s, saying that that should be maintained but suspended for the moment, as the City determines spending on other eligible programs in the program, such as repairing existing underground equipment, such as traffic signals and cable lines.
The embezzled funds had mostly come from the surtax.
The Underground Surtax aspect of the program—begun in the mid-1960s—generates about $5.5 million per year, enough revenue to fund the undergrounding of approximately one-half mile of existing overhead utility lines per year, PWP said in an earlier report.
Tuesday’s discussion at the Municipal Services Committee can be accessed through
http://pasadena.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?publish_id=9 and www.pasadenamedia.org.
During the meeting, members of the public may provide live public comment by submitting a speaker card prior to the start of public comment through www.cityofpasadena.net/commissions/public-comment.
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