Economic Development, Technology & City Light Committee 6/14/23

The meeting of the Economic Development Technology and City Light will come to order.

It is 9.30.

I'm Sarah Nelson, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council President Juarez?

Here.

Council Member Sawant?

Present.

Council Member Strauss?

Present.

Council Member Herbold?

Chair Nelson?

Present.

Four present, one absent.

Thank you.

We have one item on today's agenda relating to Seattle City Light.

It's an ordinance giving them some flexibility on moving overhead electric facilities on streets and alleys in the First Hill neighborhood.

Are there any objections to the agenda?

Nope, seeing none, the agenda is adopted.

With that, we'll now move into public comment on items listed on the agenda.

We have nobody signed up to give comment in person, and I'm checking the list, and no one is signed up on our public comment remote list so I am now officially closing public comment.

With that, we'll move into the item of business.

So a brief reminder though, this is going to be a rather short meeting.

We are only going to be discussing this item and not taking a vote today.

Now, this is legislation that has to do with a historical ordinance from 1969 mandating that the undergrounding of electric utilities has to occur in certain neighborhoods.

That was 55 years ago.

And there's not a lot of record as to some of the process that led up to that.

But City Lights practice in First Hill has been to move utilities underground, overhead utilities underground whenever safety and new construction standards are triggered, but the department has determined that it can maintain and safely operate some overhead utilities.

And so today we're going to have a presentation on a request for some flexibility because there are some upgrades that have to happen in a small portion of First Hill.

So I will invite the presenters to come up to the table now.

Excuse me.

What?

Oh, okay.

We're going to, pardon me, while you're going up there, we will read this item into the record.

Agenda item number one, Council Bill 120594, an ordinance relating to underground utility districts, authorizing the City Light Department to evaluate the risks presented by overhead facilities on streets and alleys in the First Hill District, and to determine, based upon the department's engineering standards, whether electric facilities should be undergrounded and whether to dispose of remaining utility poles, and amending sections 21.68.070 and 21.68.090 and 21.68.100 of the Seattle Municipal Code for briefing and discussion.

Hello, good morning.

Go ahead and introduce yourselves and begin your presentation, please.

Thank you, Council Member Nelson.

I'm Jeff Wolfe.

I'm the Legal Affairs Advisor for Seattle City Light.

Hi, good morning and thank you.

My name's Hina Arai and I'm a Senior Policy and Project Manager in the General Manager's Office at Seattle City Light.

Good morning, I'm Eric McConaughey.

I'm the Council Central Staff.

And we have Council Member Herbold with us now as well.

Thank you.

Good morning, Council Members.

We're here today asking City Council to amend Seattle Municipal Code Chapter 2168 as it pertains to the First Hill District.

You can go to the next slide.

Seattle Municipal Code 2168 establishes four mandatory undergrounding districts.

The Central Area University District, South Seattle, First Hill, and Leschi.

We're focusing just on First Hill here.

Mandatory undergrounding in this context means that all communication lines shall be undergrounded within defined areas and put within the right of way.

And that property owners must, at their own cost, connect to the underground distribution facilities.

So they need to build the infrastructure to hold the conduit that connects to the right of way.

And they need to do the trenching and move the point of connection to their buildings to a location that can be attached underground.

If you look at the four districts, The central area is mostly complete.

South Seattle is entirely complete.

Leschi is entirely complete.

And First Hill is only 20% complete.

And part of that is the complexity with First Hill, given the density of the neighborhood and the reliance upon the streets in the area.

Next slide.

This gives you a little bit of area.

This is the First Hill District on this map.

The First Hill District goes from Roy on the north down to Madison on the south.

It's bounded by I-5.

It essentially is the west side of Capitol Hill and First Hill looking into the city.

We have a neighborhood that we're focusing on where we need to do a 4K conversion.

What that is is that we have 26 KV.

That's the voltage that runs through the distribution system in Seattle that City Light operates under.

And we have some antiquated lines that are 4KV.

And they need to be converted to 26 KV to meet the standards that we set.

And also because we don't have the replacement parts to replace 4KV infrastructure should it fail.

And so we have some urgency in getting this work done.

The neighborhood that we're focusing on is currently in this little yellow outline, which is bounded by Belmont on the East, Summit on the West, Harrison on the North, and East John Street on the South.

It includes 40 separate service addresses and 650 customer accounts.

Next slide.

This is another depiction of the map on the right, the area that we are focusing on.

On the left is an engineering diagram, and I included this here in this presentation because you can see it's color-coded, and the pink areas are those areas with buildings that have 4K service at this time and need to be converted.

Next slide.

Just to give you a little bit more background, the mandatory undergrounding ordinance is distinguished from the neighborhoods where undergrounding was performed as part of a local improvement district.

This is a mandatory ordinance, not something that the neighbors themselves elected to do.

The proposed amendments that are being presented today for your approval allows City Light discretion in its planning to determine which distribution lines in the First Hill District should be undergrounded based on engineering standards.

And if communication lines using the same poles need to be undergrounded, City Light will coordinate with these NETs to underground their lines as part of the same project to be most efficient.

We believe this is a win-win for the utility and the customers.

here again focusing on the area that we're we're working on you can see on the picture on the left is an alley and it has some poles that you are very close to the buildings themselves within one or two feet and that doesn't meet our current clearance standards especially when we upgrade to 26 kv At 26 KV, our clearance standards is 14 feet from the building.

So those poles will need to be undergrounded in order to meet our engineering standards.

However, that's distinguished from the photograph on the right, which is Harrison Street, where we meet all the clearance standards that those lines that are currently up there are 26 KV already.

There's no work that needs to be done on those lines.

Under the ordinance, we would be required to underground that system.

And there's no real good reason to do that.

It would just be a use of money that wouldn't really benefit directly either the utility or the customers.

Next slide.

So as Jeff stated earlier, The man maintaining the code in its current form creates disparities, it treats the first hill neighborhood.

differently than other similarly situated neighborhoods without basis.

The disparity results in both direct and indirect costs.

For example, a customer under the current code, a customer living in the First Hill neighborhood, once City Light converted its system, would have to pay to move their service drops, which is a service drop is where City Light's electrical cables connect to the customer's facility.

So for example, like where their meter is, And not only would they have to pay to move their service drop but would also have to pay to trench underground to connect to city lights handhold electrical box very similar to how an SPU customers are responsible for their side sewer all the way up to SPUs main.

An indirect cost is customers would experience the loss of use of their streets, as well as loss of parking for the duration of the project for when city light is underground in their system.

The poles carrying communication lines and redundant services would likely remain because the existing code does not have an enforcement mechanism to mandate removal.

Heena, could you stop there a second?

Of course.

Has there been public pushback the last time there was mandatory undergrounding and then customers were told how much it would cost them and what would, you know, the impacts to their street?

Do you remember the last time, the last process this occurred in?

We're not aware that it's ever been done in an area with this density of buildings and where the infrastructure is, and you'll see some photographs.

In this presentation, where there's a lot of complications in terms of underground and given the current infrastructure, the buildings, so we haven't really experienced that in South Seattle and unless I they were will certainly in South Seattle, there was much more open area, it was more of an industrial area.

didn't have quite the same density of populations, and it was more businesses.

Same with more of the U District area.

So this is kind of unique in terms of doing this, and this is one of the reasons why we have delayed modifying the infrastructure in this area to the end.

Thank you.

Next slide, please.

So this is an example of sort of the consequence of mandatory undergrounding.

So if you if you look at this picture, this customer has their service drop on the left side of their of the building.

As you can see, there's a lot of beautiful rockery.

So this customer would have to dig up their rockery, move their service drop, and trench through all the way to City Light's hand-held electrical box, which would cost a lot.

And any time a customer has to spend their own funding to meet sort of clearance and reliability and electrical standards.

I mean, they have challenges, right?

They have issues and they're not so happy.

So this would be an example of where a customer would experience such disparity.

Next slide, please.

So SEL looked at the disparate impacts carefully and crafted amendments that would allow SEL to assess overhead facilities consistent with our engineering standards and to determine whether electric cable would need to be undergrounded and then of course develop appropriate plans.

Additionally, the amendment would also give City Light discretion to determine disposition of telecommunication poles, whether they should stay and could serve another purpose, like streetlights, or whether they should be removed.

Finally, the amendment would allow City Light to lead coordination efforts with telecoms and to set a schedule for facility removals, as well as notice to customers that the telecom should provide.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

And Eric, do you have anything you would like to add?

No, thank you.

I appreciate the detail.

I will say I saw an earlier version of the presentation and I really like what you did with the maps.

I like cartography and I really appreciated seeing you call out the pink areas to give context for kind of where the work is up against the photography.

So thanks for that.

That's just me as one of the viewers.

I like that part.

Thank you.

So it's clear that you're asking for some flexibility here that will save the property owners some money and probably also the utility.

So my question is, what about the property owners about the lines in the alley that will be undergrounded?

Well, I did take a tour of that area on that particular alley.

And again, this is this ordinance affects the entire first hill district.

So there will be a lot of different permutations as to what we encounter over the years as we modify these areas.

But with respect to the one area, the alley between Summit and Belmont, I did tour with the engineers that particular area and those.

apartment buildings, and there's a single home, I believe, as well.

will incur some cost to connect for sure.

But some of them have already understood that this was coming up and they've already planned and have some underground connection.

The area where they connect to their building is already underground and they have a conduit from the pole going down to where it would be connected.

So they're already ready in many instances to receive a connection from our underground facilities.

Okay, thank you.

And I understand that one policy outcome of this legislation is intended to support more affordable housing.

Can you speak to that a bit?

Sure.

Housing is always, you know, the expense that it takes to build the housing is certainly a factor.

And when we, when, when a building owner is required to do underground infrastructure, that's always more expensive than an overhead connection.

And so in this instance, there, you know, the, the building owner could choose to go underground if they chose to, but they could choose the cheaper option and go overhead.

Thank you.

Okay.

I'm looking to see if there are any questions from my colleagues.

I'm not seeing any I have one more question when are you scheduled to begin this work.

If that we approve this ordinance.

Well, we, we have an engineering design already put in place, which followed the ordinance which required the entire thing to be undergrounded.

However, because we have an urgency here, because we have replacement parts that are difficult to find, the 4K conversion is of some urgency, what we're planning to do is to amend the current plan, and assuming the passage of this ordinance, amend the current plan so that those areas that don't need to be undergrounded will remain as they are, And then we will underground those portions, which is already designed.

So I don't foresee that it'll take too long to make those changes.

And I would hope that we could get going in 2024. Okay, thank you very much.

All right, I have no more questions.

And if nobody else here does, I'm not seeing a hand up.

This concludes the agenda of the June 14th meeting of the Economic Development and Technology, excuse me, let me say that again, of the Economic Development Technology and City Light Committee.

I really appreciate you bringing this forward and we will discuss and possibly vote this out of committee on the 28th.

Thank you, council members.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

This meeting is adjourned.

It's 948.