City to begin line burial project

By Charles Sowell  

OCTOBER 9, 2009 5:36 a.m. (0)

The long-awaited pilot startup of burying power lines along Haywood Road in Greenville is to start after Jan. 1, city officials said this week.

Haywood Road should be more snarled than normal for the foreseeable future, as work will start soon on adding sidewalks to the Haywood Mall side of the multi-lane thoroughfare.

That work will be followed by construction on the opposite side of the road to bury power lines along a one-mile segment from Interstate 385 to Laurens Road, Nancy Sue, utility program manager told city council during a work session earlier this week.

Mayor Knox White was pleased by the news and said planning for the project, the first phase, should coincide with planning for burying lines along a stretch of Augusta Road.

The Augusta Road area was hard hit by power outages following a massive ice storm that hit the Upstate nearly four years ago. That storm left nearly a million people cold and in the dark, some for weeks.

City Manager Jim Bourey said Haywood Road was chosen to kick off the power line burial program because there are fewer land owners to deal with and quite a few of the businesses in the mall area already have their feeder lines under ground.

Councilman David Sudduth wasn’t happy with the decision, but said, “It’s good to get started even though Haywood wasn’t the most severely affected area in the city during the ice storm.”

Duke Energy has said it does little good to bury major three-phase lines if feeder lines to homes and businesses are not sunk into the ground, too.

Sue said a definite time table for finishing the pilot project won’t be set until after design work is done and the city finishes gathering the requisite easements for things like the above-ground portions of the project.

The power lines will be housed in sturdy conduits along the highway right of way and will feed out from there to serve customers.

What will happen to power poles is undecided, as is what will happen to other service companies, like cable TV, who use the poles to serve their customers. A draft ordinance on power poles and other issues relating to the undergrounding program was discussed by council and put on hold for fine tuning by the city attorney.

The undergrounding program is being funded by an extra one percent Duke’s franchise fee to the city that is matched by an additional half percent donated by the power company. That works out to about $1.8 million available to fund work right now, said Phil Robey, director of management and budget for the city.

Exact figures will not be available on the Haywood project until design work and easement purchases are done, Sue said.

Bourey estimated the work would be in the $1 million range.

“This is a long-term project,” Sue told the Journal. “The actual size (of the pilot) is small, as is the effect, but we hope to have great impact over time.”

Council also discussed the possibility of issuing a bond to fund burying power lines and paying for it with income from Duke’s donation and from the one percent of franchise fee.

Bourey said DOT is under time constraints on the sidewalk project because federal stimulus money is involved. “The sensible thing to do would be to do both projects at the same time on the same side off the street,” he said. “But we won’t be able to do that.”