Push is on to bury power lines

They’re the most closely watched high-voltage lines in Rhode Island.
Dangling across a picket line of rusty towers from Providence’s Knowledge District to East Providence, the India Point power lines, as they’re known, have been the subject of a frustrated plan to remove them from public view for the past 11 years.
With progress on a large project to bury the lines languishing, the residents who’ve pushed the plan since its inception are redoubling their efforts to achieve the critical mass of support needed to make it happen.
They’ve gotten the state-backed Interstate 195 Redevelopment District Commission involved and, in the process, organizations pursuing new building plans for the surrounding waterfront neighborhoods are getting behind it.
The new push appears to be having at least some impact.
The I-195 commission, which is responsible for developing 20 acres of prime land in Providence, met with officials from the city and East Providence about the power lines in early September.
Providence officials say talks with stakeholders, including utility National Grid, are “ongoing.”
But whether the backing of a few new and powerful groups can free the plan from the tangle of the competing interests and priorities is unclear.
With the state, two cities, multiple property owners, a utility, its regulators and thousands of electricity ratepayers all involved, the project is weighed down by its own complexity.
To get the 1.2 miles of power lines out of the air, National Grid would need to put them in tunnels beneath the Providence and Seekonk rivers, as well as manage a right of way through the southern end of the Fox Point neighborhood.
And at the heart of the debate, of course, is who is going to pay for the burial project, which National Grid’s most recent estimates peg at $22 million.
At least $17.2 million of that total has already been secured from a mix of federal, state and utility-related sources.
And under a 2004 settlement signed by Providence, East Providence, National Grid and the R.I. attorney general, residents were supposed to pick up the rest with a surcharge on their utility bills.
But as the project’s costs have grown over time and new leaders have moved into various elected offices, the cities appear to have had second thoughts about footing the rest of the bill.
David Ortiz, spokesman for Providence Mayor Angel Taveras, said discussions between the city and stakeholders, including East Providence and National Grid, are now “active and occurring on a regular basis.” However, Ortiz acknowledged that “financial considerations” were holding things up and said the city is “evaluating all options” to see if there is a way to get it done without local ratepayers picking up the entire part of the cost that has not been funded yet.
East Providence officials did not immediately return calls for comment.
And that’s where the city has reached a sticking point with National Grid, which is agnostic about the value of burying the power lines and has resisted passing the costs to bills of Rhode Island customers outside Providence and East Providence.
“A settlement agreement is in effect that directs National Grid to place the line underground,” said National Grid spokesman David Graves. “We are prepared to do that once all of the conditions of the settlement are in place.”
Tied up in the debate about the India Point lines is a larger question about whether electrical cables should be above our heads, as they often are in this country, or below our feet, as is often the case in Europe.
Overhead power lines are generally cheaper to put up and easier to repair, but fail more often because they are exposed to weather and other hazards. They also have a negative impact on the property values immediately surrounding them.
Underground lines have fewer outages and don’t detract from their surroundings, but are more expensive to build and are more difficult to repair when they do fail.
In 2006, ISO New England, operator of the regional electrical grid served by the India Point lines – which run from the Manchester Street Station to the Brayton Point Power Plant – agreed to dedicate $1.5 million pooled by the six New England states for maintenance, toward the burial project.
ISO agreed that the towers crossing the two rivers, 40 and 80 years old respectively, needed to be replaced, but said it would be cheaper to keep them above ground on new towers crossing the Seekonk River north of the Washington Bridge.
If all sides can come to an understanding on the project, the first step under the 2004 settlement is for the cities to acquire the properties and easements needed for tunneling to begin. Speaking to the I-195 commission in September, Paul Roberti, a member of the Public Utilities Commission who fought for the project as an employee in the attorney general’s office a decade ago, suggested once the lines are buried, the property will be valuable enough to at least recoup the expense of acquiring it.
One of the primary arguments for burying the power lines is that the current arrangement depresses the value of the land around the towers, which includes the I-195 land and India Point Park, areas the state and city already have invested heavily in.
That’s spurred Providence developer Churchill & Banks, which wants to build a mixed-use building on Pike Street and bid on the nearby I-195 land, to write a letter to the city in support of the “major asset” the burial would be.
Bowl Arts, the group looking to build a waterfront concert venue on the former Shooters nightclub property, also has gotten behind the project.
“We strongly align ourselves with the effort to bury them and beautify the area,” wrote Bowl Arts principals Sam White and Michael Gazdacko earlier this year.
Rhode Island School of Design, Johnson & Wales University and Brown University also have written recent letters supporting the project.
Although I-195 commissioners at a September meeting on the power lines expressed unqualified support for burial (a vote to officially back the project was delayed because it wasn’t on the agenda), the group has been cagey about what it will do to help.
Chairman Colin Kane and Executive Director Jan Brody met with Providence and East Providence officials for an “informal introductory meeting” Sept. 3 on the power lines, but no requests were made, commission spokeswoman Dyana Koelsch said.
On the central financial issue of whether all Rhode Island ratepayers would pay for the burial or just Providence and East Providence, Friends of India Point Park co-chairman David Riley, who has become the face of the effort, said burial projects near Fidelity’s campus in Smithfield and homes in East Greenwich have been spread statewide in the past.
“The payments should be spread out,” Riley said. “People say this is being driven by aesthetics, but the connection between aesthetics and economic development is critical. Benefit Street is aesthetics and WaterFire is aesthetics. A huge draw of the waterfront is because it is beautiful.” •

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