The Palo Alto City Council will have a rare chance later this year to revisit the city's decision to stop burying overhead electric lines underground in residential neighborhoods, Utilities Department staff said last week.

As Palo Alto Online reported last month, the city has effectively stopped its historic practice of putting electric lines underground in residential areas, an effort that kicked off in the late 1960s and that proceeded for the next three decades before gradually petering out in the 1990s.

While some residents continue to hope to see overhead lines in their neighborhoods buried, Utilities Department staff have largely halted the practice, which they say would slow down the city's more-important plans to update its electric grid.

In a presentation to the Utilities Advisory Commission, staff made its case for continuing its current practice, which limits undergrounding to areas where AT&T could share some of the costs.

Tomm Marshall, assistant director for engineering, told the commission on Oct. 10 that such areas are limited to main thoroughfares. If the city wants to convert residential neighborhoods to undergrounding, it will have to pay all of the costs of doing so. Homeowners in these districts would also incur costs between $6,000 and $10,000 per household to get service extended to their property, he said.

Today, the city has about 116 miles of overhead lines and 195 underground, much of it in the Stanford Research Park area. About 2,000 residential units are currently served by the underground system while about 14,000 have overhead lines. The city is now moving ahead with one undergrounding project in the foothills area with the goal of reducing wildfire risk. Once that project is done, the city's overhead distribution system will consist of 106 miles of electric lines, according to the department.

Marshall said that when one considers all the single-family homes, apartment buildings and commercial structures in Palo Alto, the number of structures that would need to undergrounded lines is about 18,000. If the city were to change its strategy and move electrical lines for 1,000 structures per year, it would take 18 years to do so.

"It may not sound that bad, but it's a huge undertaking," Marshall told the commission.

He estimated that the effort would cost between $665 million and $990 million to complete. More importantly, from staff's perspective, it would significantly delay ongoing plans to upgrade the electric grid. The grid modernization project is a key component of the city's plan to encourage residents and businesses to switch from gas-powered vehicles and appliances to electric equipment.

Utilities officials maintain that the upgrade is necessary for the city to meet the council's adopted goal of reducing emissions by 80% by 2030, with 1990 as the baseline.

"Undergrounding of electric facilities cannot be combined with electrification in time to meet the 2030 goal for carbon emissions due to the large increase in work scope," a new report from the Utilities Department states.

"In addition, the cost of City-wide undergrounding will require an expansion of funding sources to finance the project. Due to the current policies in place, staff are focusing on completing the work to support the climate protection goals of the City."

The report acknowledges, however, that undergrounding of electric equipment has "widespread support in the community."

"The existing policy should be reviewed in the future to determine if the City-wide undergrounding program should be revised to facilitate faster implementation," Marshall's report states.

While members of the commission accepted staff's explanation for why undergrounding has largely been aborted, they also pointed at the disconnect between the city's policies and the community's expectations. Commissioner Robert Phillips noted that many residents still believe the city will at some point move ahead with undergrounding in their neighborhoods.

"Most of this will never be underground in our lifetime — that would be my interpretation of what I'm seeing here," Phillips said after the staff presentation. "I don't know why people expect it to happen but a lot of people think it's supposed to happen."

Commissioner Rachel Croft concurred and pointed to readers' comments on Palo Alto Online's recent story on undergrounding, which indicated an interest among residents in seeing the conversions proceed.

"It did seem clear that the community expects things to become underground because they think it's part of modernizing society — eventually you put your lines underground," Croft said.

Both Marshall and Utilities Director Dean Batchelor said it would take a policy change for the city to speed up its undergrounding effort. The new utilities report noted that if the city agrees to pursue an "accelerated undergrounding project" the earliest it could be completed would be 2048 because of the need to coordinate that with grid modernization and to go through the bond financing process.

Batchelor said staff plans to present its report on undergrounding to the City Council before the end of the year, at which point members will have their first opportunity since 2013 to discuss the city's policy on this topic.

"One of the things that staff wants to know from council is: Do you want to change the policies? And if you do, do you want to change the priorities? Do you want to, as a council, make a decision that you want to do undergrounding and electrification, knowing it could be a 20-year project?" Batchelor said.