Commentary: Stop undergrounding petition in Newport Heights
Open letter to the Newport Beach City Council:
Dear City Council,
The undergrounding utility petition process in Newport Heights (AD118) has gone on long enough. The city should officially end it now and update the petition process itself.
A city-paid mailing to all AD118 homeowners for special assessment proceedings has failed to generate the needed 60% of community support after almost five months. In fact, the opposite is true.
The noundergrounding.com coalition has shown evidence to city officials that more than 40% (currently 43.8%) of AD118 homeowners are against this proposal. The city is refusing to verify these signatures, and by unnecessarily prolonging the petition process, is essentially colluding with the aesthetic activists.
It is unconscionable that the city is allowing this unending intrusive attack on its homeowners. Even the largest bond issue or the controversial “dock tax” pales in comparison to the financial magnitude of this utility petition process simply for aesthetics. Why are the “Less Government is More” council members permitting this to happen?
It is nonsense to force homeowners to pay thousands of dollars (and it doesn’t matter if it’s $15,000 or $35,000) in addition to having their lives disrupted, their homes torn apart, and having to deal with hundreds of contractors to rewire their homes, paint, landscape and perhaps dig trenches on their property (at their own expense). And this is enforced by the threat of “foreclosure with no notice of delinquency or grace period” (official petition wording) simply because of someone else’s idea of aesthetics.
In Newport Heights, the fight has cost thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours by dozens of determined undergrounding opponents. Multiply this by the nine petitions active around the city and you get some idea of the effort required to defend ourselves against this aggressive city policy.
City officials claim the city is neutral, but the facts speak otherwise.
1. The city has acknowledged it doesn’t have the usually required formal letter from ANY residents requesting the petition for undergrounding in AD118 (the usual procedure posted on the city’s website) and have failed to disclose the special circumstances in this case for the city itself to initiate the process.
2.The city has acknowledged that it “essentially cut/skipped some steps in the process and went right to the petition stage to save time” (in a Feb. 25, 2015 email from the assistant city engineer.)
3. The city paid for the petition mailing, which also included postage-paid return postcards.
4. After acknowledging that the petition mailing was flawed for various reasons, the city did not send a mailing to homeowners notifying them of their ability to rescind their names.
5. The city refused to consider and act on evidence that the noundergrounding.com proponents had more than the 40% of the support needed to stop the petition process.
6. The city has indicated that it will count incomplete postcards (without the requisite parcel number), many of which have not been accompanied by the required official petition information.
What should be done by the City Council? First of all, stop the AD118 petition process immediately if proponents don’t have the required signatures. Not doing so is a waste of time, effort and possibly $400,000 of taxpayer money simply for the estimate.
Most importantly, update and clarify the antiquated undergrounding petition process. The 1913 law under which we decide undergrounding issues is more than 100 years old and predated widespread electrical, telephone, television, nuclear or solar power, and Internet services. Specific suggestions for updating the process are available on noundergrounding.com.
It’s time for the City Council to be proactive and stop allowing a few aesthetic activists to have unlimited time to continually harass uninterested homeowners, who only want to be left in peace.
It is simply not fair to force others to pay more than $20,000 (ironically, enough to pay for a sustainable solar installation and almost eliminate our monthly Edison electric bills) for the aesthetic whims of their neighbors.
Portia Weiss
Newport Beach