This decision should go to a ballot measure. South PA residents voted to fund undergrounding because the ballot commitment was to implement it CITYWIDE. If the city is deciding now not to deliver on that promise in south PA, that is bait and switch.

The city implemented North PA firstl. When the funding ran out, they stopped the project. Recently the city has discovered that undergrounded wires have much higher maintenance costs. How about creating a special revenue district to charge residents who are beneficiaries of undergrounding for the incremental cost of maintaining undergrounded wires?

Further, not one more penny should come from the General Fund for undergrounding. If wealthy foothills residents want it, they can have a special revenue district to pay for its implementation and maintenance in their area.

South Palo Alto should not have to pay for home improvements for the city's wealthiest neighborhoods. Our part of the city, apparently, will not benefit as the original ballot measure promised, so we should not have to pay one more red cent.

Our remaining south PA above-ground wires continue to be a fire hazard and visual blight. I can remember a driver hitting a wood utility pole less than a block from my home. Wires crashed and began to spark in a terrifying arc that came close to trees and buildings. This is a risk for us all.

Why should south PA pay for a safety benefit that is limited to the city's richest neighborhoods? If they really want it, they can pay for it. Bait and switch ballot measures undermine trust. Extending this handsome benefit to more wealthy neighborhoods will only exacerbate the unfairness of this. Make it right with special revenue districts.

How much does outages cost the city? Not just the cost to the utilities, but to all residents?

When Charleston Plaza was without power for 12 hours this summer, not only did fresh foods have to be thrown out, but businesses lost a valuable weekend day of business. If utilities was the only cost, then that would be one thing, but losing power now costs business revenue, wastage of food and more inconvenience than just having the lights go out.

Someone really needs to weigh the costs of each outage we have anytime this happens. Then we can really see how incovenient it is when we lose power.

I agree with much of the above post. I would add that it makes little sense for PA to have its own utility. Not cost effective or efficient as this case demonstrates. PG&E has committed to under grounding all its utilities and indicates it is both safer and cost effective in the long run. High risk should be a priority over high income but all should benefit. If you commit to something do it.

Residents who are interested in under grounding utilities may not be aware that most of the lower hanging and very ugly messes of wires and boxes on power poles were installed for cable TV, phone, and Internet streaming purposes. Where the city's Utilities Department has followed standards and has done a terrific job installing electrical power lines to our homes, the cable/phone/streaming lines look as if they have been installed with no regards for esthetics, efficiency or durability. All of those lines would need to be under grounded, not just the electrical lines, and the companies providing services over those lines should pay.

@ Dave,
I disagree with most of your post. First, PG&E is NOT undergrounding all of their utilities. They are undergrounding some fraction of their overhead electric transmission lines in high-fire potential areas. They only underground wires in selected neighborhoods where a defined decision making process of the residents and the city/county government and PG&E takes place.
Also, I (and I believe many Palo Alto residents) are quite happy with the historically lower utility rates that we have compared to PG&E areas (even if you include the "tax" to the general fund). We also experience better response to problems and upgrade requests.

"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."

I was shocked to see those very low figures because I paid $8,500 back in the late 80s -- about 34 years ago.

This suggests that CPAU et al aren't doing their homework carefully -- just like they didn't when they pushed Fiber To The Home for all of Palo Alto only to backtrack and finally admit that those of us in undergrounded neighborhoods won't benefit from this hugely expensive undertaking.

Seems like the money the City would save by not building the no longer needed Caltrain grade separations would pay for undergrounding the rest of the city.

The City must account for all costs in each district. One cost is ADA compliance. In Ventura neighborhood, City sidewalks are inaccessible. The picture of the “substation on Park Boulevard” from PA Online’s June 8, 2023, article, “As more residents go electric, Palo Alto eyes major grid upgrade,” shows a power pole squarely in the middle of the sidewalk that impedes wheelchairs. Ventura has several others. The City cannot correct its non-compliance without undergrounding. The situation may differ elsewhere, but it’s a glaring problem in this corner of the City that our elected officials increasingly hope to stuff with more housing.

Other costs include those associated with outages, accidents, tree trimming, sight lines and safety (Donatus Okhomina Jr. might still be alive today if he hadn’t been 38 feet off the ground separated from co-workers when he died), all of which are positively impacted by undergrounding. If there’s still a net cost to undergrounding after a full accounting, the City can seek offsetting funds dedicated to improving grid reliability/resilience, climate change mitigation, ADA compliance, special assessments to developers, and other sources (or cut spending on other programs like high speed rail studies). If we can underground the sewer system, surely we can underground the wires!

Re: “Undergrounding of electric facilities cannot be combined with electrification by 2030,” no one is asking for undergrounding to be finished by 2030, but if a major overhaul to above-ground wires is happening anyway, why not take advantage of the opportunity to underground at this time? We just spent megabucks replacing utility poles without asking residents if they’d rather see those funds diverted into undergrounding.

Re: undergrounding is only happening in places where fire risk is high. Even if that were true (which it is not), we are all in a high fire risk area according to the weed abatement notices sent to us at government expense, not to mention PSPS.

PS: We've been undergrounded since the late 1980s and so rarely experience outages that friends in neighborhoods without undergrounding who are experiencing outages routinely call us to have us search out information about when service might be restored.

The city should acknowledge that the long outages are costly in terms of ruined food etc and especially dangerous to the ill and elderly who depending on power for their stairlifts and other health appliances.

Even PG&E grants refunds for power outages while CPAU still does not.

I lived in Greenacres I. In the 1970s we asked the city to let us underground our utilities. We paid off the ?bond over a period of time. It was the smartest decision. No ugly wires, no downed utilities when the wind gets to 100 mph, or the torrential rains of yesteryears swamped the area.

The city should have rolled that out and coaxial cables. Hindsight is a great teacher. Go do it; make our green skyscape lovelier and safer.

That is my back yard in the photo. There are 9 lines attached to two poles in/next to my back yard. All these lines are not electrical lines. What are they and what do they do? How about the ones in your back yard?

Today I read in the New York Times that our electrical grid is not adequate for our new electrical need and more lines need to be installed. Is that true in Palo Alto? Will Palo Alto have to put up more electrical lines? How ugly and dangerous. Let's put them underground.

I have also read that putting batteries in garages can even out the electrical needs of homes (and cars) and works well with home solar panels. The electrical distributor pays for the batteries and it is a game changer for the electrical grid.

With the increasing problems with sparking electrical lines and transformers in high winds; more elderly people needing steady electricity for health machines; and the increased outages (there is a pole in my neighborhood that cars keep running into) I want us to look at new solutions to problems. Let's not make our solutions ugly and dangerous and out of date before they are installed. Please underground (like a sewer system and the water grates in the streets).

Do we actually need a new policy? I thought we had one: bury those lines. It seems that Utilities Dept. is violating existing policy. Perhaps we need a new law/policy that sets a timetable for undergrounding.

Everyone knows what's wrong with overhead lines: they are unreliable, they are ugly, and we butcher our beautiful trees to make way for them. But now we're told that upgrading our system to support widespread electrification precludes undergrounding. Go take a look at those poles, wires, insulators, an transformers. The wires on the top are the high-voltage (2400/4160 volts). the wires are too small, they must be replaced with fatter ones. The voltage is too low, needs to be 7200/12470 instead of 2400/4160. So the insulators must be replaced with bigger ones and all the transformers replaced to handle the new primary voltage. Also we will need about four times as many of them. That is a lot more money, and a lot more ugliness, and more tree-trimming. And then we're going to scrap all of it when we finally go underground! What a colossal waste of money and resources! Let's invest ouir money in the future, not in the past. We're not expanding our gas lines, let's not expand our overhead lines either.

We are a city that values esthetics and trees, yet we put up these ugly poles and wires, and butcher our trees, because we're too cheap to do it right?

BTW, a word to those complaining that the south end of town is getting the short end: Not so! The most expensive neighborhoods mostly have overhead wires. My midtown neighborhood is underground; across Oregon Expressway the houses cost twice as much but the utilities are overhead.

Going underground is an enormous project.
Some thing maybe that may not have been thought about. Months of machinery and people in the back yard is not for everyone.