Ilene bovin coalition for San Francisco neighborhoods here on my own behalf. On the overhead is the proposal for the 2019 Building Code update. It was presented at the Capital Planning committee on july 22 of this year. In its presentation, the department of the environment stated that 35 of the citys emissions today is from privatesector natural gas. To reduce these emissions, the proposal is to encourage all electric design in new construction. The timeline for this proposal is for review by the department of building inspection and Code Advisory Committee in august, the board of supervisors Land Use Committee in september, and the full board in october. While not in the department of the environment presentation, the Capital PlanningCommittee Members expressed concerns. With increased reliance on electricity, the issue of reliability was raised. The response was possible use of Battery Storage for electricity. Although not specifically related to this presentation, the issue of undergrounding was raised. With the risk of blown transformers and downed power lines, the undergrounding of utility wires should be considered as well. With pg e in bankruptcy, i would urge the sf puc, and the board to replace storage batteries and the undergrounding of lines on the table. In response to pg e, the west side has lots of gophers. The sand dunes are their native habitat. We shouldnt put in undergrounding without concern for the gophers. District 1 district 4. Supervisor fewer yes, i know i have gophers in my back yard. Does the Committee Want a copy of this . Supervisor fewer yes, thank you very much. Okay. Supervisor fewer thank you. Next speaker, please. Yes, next speaker, please. Can i have the overhead, please. Thank you, supervisors, particularly stefani for showing up and fewer and stefani for proposing this legislation and supervisor walton. Thank you very much for hearing this important safety issue today. My name is richard cardello. Im a board member of russian members and a long supporter of the San Francisco coalition to underground utilities. Really, thank you for bringing this up and ive learned a lot today. Thank you for calling the speakers. Sadly, were all too aware of the recent devastating fires contributed to downed power lines which resulted in a great loss of life and property. The existence of the very many remaining overhead wires in San Francisco makes the everpresent danger of an impending earthquake that much more ominous. I wonder if all these wires are still in active use or if many have been abandoned. I learned what the definition of abandoned means now, it means nothing. Supervisor fewer yeah. Im also concerned about the potential interference with fire safety and if the Fire Department is unable to use their ladders in some cases because of the interference of overhead wires. I was first attracted to the cause of undergrounding for esthetic reasons. Ive grown to appreciate that the tangles of wires above our heads also represent an extreme hazard for residents and visitors to our city. Please move to remove this danger over us. Thank you so much supervisor fewer thank you very much, sir. I need three hands. Oh, dear. Wait a minute. Thank you, supervisors, for hosting this hearing today. I am the chairman of the San Francisco coalition to underground utilities. In addressing the proliferation of wires, poles, and equipment in the 45 of our city that is endangered by its existence, it is only right to point out that you address today only a portion of the citys residents, as more than half the city enjoys undergrounded utilities and its paralleled increased safety. It is therefore doubly important to bring parity to the rest of your constituents. As telecom saddles every single american pole with new equipment by order of the middle class tax act of 2012, pole heights are being raised, increased 4 to 7 feet, changing the relationship of existing wires to both poles and adjacent properties, creating swinging, sagging boxes and wires which then are blithely controlled with duct tape, if at all. This duct tape was applied in february of 2016, pg e apparently reviewed these poles annually. This duct tape has been there now three years. By dpw permit requirement, telecom must attach its new equipment in a neat and orderly condition without excess loops. But with no requirement to refrain from making existing wires worse. An interim solution prior to undergrounding is obvious to me. Telecom [ indiscernible ] [microphone not activated]. Clerk the speakers time is concluded. Supervisor fewer thank you very much. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Good morning, supervisors. Thank you for having this hearing. My name is mark snider. Im a resident of district 8 and a member of the San Francisco coalition of underground utilities steering committee. Were a city at risk for earthquakes, and a strong earthquake will certainly topple utility poles. Residents and tourists alike will risk injury and death from falling poles, but the wires on the street will also present a risk in that fire and emergency vehicles will not cross wires that they cannot pass without knowing that theyre safe to pass. The solution clearly is undergrounding. Its not rocket science, but it does involve engineering. There are some updates in a localization of underground facilities and utilities, and there are also updates in creating conduits without trenching. Both of these have potential for cost savings. Undergrounding will help our city become safer and more resilient, more beautiful, and its an investment that will be spread out over years and recouped those reasonable Franchise Fees on the utilities that share the conduits. Heres what i think has to be done. I hope you will assert your authority into the removal of nonfunctioning wires. I hope you legislate the digonce approach, so there will be more undergrounding when streets are dug for other purposes. I hope you will look at the Franchise Deal with pg e now that theyre in bankruptcy and look at a municipalized system. Fully fund the master plan for undergrounding and support changes to the rule 28 program that have been discussed. Thank you very much supervisor fewer thank you very much. Next speaker, please. Good morning, my name is steven edwards. Im also a member of the San Francisco coalition of underground utilities. I live in district 8. I wanted to point out what seems to me a huge discrepancy between the what we heard this morning in this hearing and what we see on the streets. The speakers from the telecoms and from pg e this morning emphasized and went into considerable detail about the protocols that they use in order to coordinate amongst themselves and how they ensure that each of the various steps are taken to make sure that things are installed on poles, that theyre safe, that theyre earthquake safe and so on. And yet, the reality before our eyes that you see over here, this is what it really looks like. This is not what we heard. All this stuff, the tape, you see the cut bits there that you see hanging down, theyre using these not poles, but the wires themselves to store large heavy coils of cable. I heard no one say that any form of academic or Scientific Study has been done on the risks of these hanging things swinging in an earthquake. So my question to you would be would you be able to find out what would happen in a 7. 0 earthquake with all of this swinging material . Thank you very much supervisor fewer thank you very much. Next speaker, please. My name is david bancroft. Im a resident of district 2 and i too am a board member of the San Francisco coalition of underground utilities. I want to talk about two things. First i want to clear up sort of a little bit of fog that we generated today about rule 20, to make two essential points. Number one, that obviously what is going on here by the way, rule 20 funds are generated by a charge to our utility bills, so everybody. So essentially whats been going on here for the last 12, 14 years is we, those who dont have undergrounding, have been paying for paying out of our utility bills for those people who have undergrounding. This drove our coalition to not try to find certain sections of the city that would get undergrounded, but the only equitable thing to be done is to have citywide undergrounding which is the master plan. On the issue of is undergrounding better to leave the wires up, 100,000 frenchmen cant be wrong. San diego is doing this at 12 to 15 miles a year and have been doing it for the last 10 or 12 years. Santa barbara is doing it. Berkley has commissioned a study to underground if theyre going to be doing it. I mean, the proof in the pudding is very much in the knowing here. Not only as supervisor mandelman pointed out, is it common sense, but the techniques are available, the cost can be controlled and we urge you to push for a master plan after telemon reports on its initial overview for a master plan. Thank you very much. Supervisor fewer thank you very much, sir. Thank you for covering this issue. My name is lindsy phillips. I am a member of the San Francisco coalition of underground utilities. I live for the past 30 years in a 100yearold building on russian hill. There are six poles on my block. I look at them out my windows with the recently added extensions holding all of the gear for the telecom industries, some of those poles are now four storeys high. They tilt if you look at them from the top of our block. Im on a hill. One of them fell two years ago when a tree that was weakened by the drought and have not been trimmed back from the wires fell over in a wind storm, knocked down the pole which totalled two automobiles that were parked on the street and blocked the entire street. Luckily this happened in the middle of the night or someone might have been badly injured. I would like to say there are also poles behind my house. Now, as i said, i live in a very old building. These poles were probably put in 100 years ago. Theyre poorly maintained. If it rains, i have no telephone servi service. The wires until about a year ago were sheathed in paper, which is 1920s technology. I really think we have linemen that will not even climb those poles back there, theyre so dangerous. So i dont know whos inspecting them. I certainly havent seen anybody. Thank you. Supervisor fewer thank you very much. Next speaker, please. Good morning, commissioners. Thank you very much for this meeting. Ive learned a lot. My name is lucricia row. I live on russian hill and im on the board of russian hill neighbors. Ive lived in my building for over 30 years. Its on i dont mind saying its on the corner of chestnut and levenworth. There used to be four utility poles on that corner. Theres now seven. Thats why i was taken aback when the man from pg e said theyre trying to reduce the number of poles because we have three more. Plus, not only that, the new poles the old poles were replaced with much taller ones so they are almost 4 im on the fifth floor and theyre almost up to my windows. But the point i wanted to make is that from what ive heard is the tenant and owners of these poles, obviously these owners of poles are getting revenue from the tenants, tenants are leasing the space on the poles. So needless to say, they have little motivation to limit the number of tenants they have, unless there is some other Regulatory Agency that takes care of that, because its seemed like for a while every week another Cable Company or net company was coming by with big spools of cables and installing more and more and more. Needless to say i am for putting all these horrible wires and equipment underground. Thank you very much. Supervisor fewer thank you. Hello, im jill fox. Im here today as a Community Volunteer as a member of the San Francisco coalition for underground utilities. I live and vote in d 10. While i encourage you to fund a master plan, i would like you to consider the specific issue of large new developments. I live a half a mile from the shipyard. The shipyard is fully underground utilities, electric, fiberoptic cable, they advertise it. It looks beautiful. However, these utilities get to the shipyard through the established neighborhoods. All they did to power their fancy new hightech units was run wires on existing aboveground poles in the old neighborhood, poles that run on both sides of innis avenue and were installed in 1941. There have been fires, explosions, poles have collapsed. Its really not safe. So now there are hundreds of homes and eventually there will be thousands of homes basically running off an extension card past my home. So i have two suggestions have these larger Developers Pay for putting the utilities underground through the neighborhoods that feed to their projects, so that would be the shipyard and the candlestick side and several other large projects. Have the city establish a percentage per square foot fee on New Buildings that go into a citywide utility undergrounding fund. In our zeal to build, build, build, you need to consider the people who already live here, especially those of us near these big developments. With my suggestions, you will help assure while we add more homes and offices, we also make this city livable for all. Thank you supervisor fewer thank you very much. Next speaker, please. The cost of undergrounding has variously been estimated at 1. 3 million to upwards of 13 million, that shared funding through collaboration would increase project costs through decentralization and the subsequent increase in the number of stakeholders, as opposed to concentrating the present data. Is there a data reference with existing thumb notation of maximum Load Capacity on a pole stock basis with the present load volume expressed as a percentage as a laborsavings measure and in the interests of maximizing utility to suit potential requirement. So in between the poles do they keep a running number or tally of what the capacity is on the pole and between the poles . So we have also heard, if i recall, two or three speakers mention pole mapping and restrictions on information related to Homeland Security issues. So i imagine the same is true in terms of the operation of laying underground fiberoptic cable which we can all appreciate. Im wondering then if at t and pg e require that Field Operation employees verify their identities in the employment document and whether both agencies promptly comply with state and federal investigators on request, particularly given the laxity of rules regarding membership adopted by trade unions over the past decade. Supervisor fewer thank you very much. No other speakers. Public comment is now closed. Chair . Supervisor walton any more comments from colleagues . Supervisor fewer i think we learned a lot today. I want to thank colleagues for holding this hearing. I think public speakers bring up good points about the overhanging of wires and i look forward to calling for an additional hearing about the study, but actually i think there are still some open issues about what is on those poles. And now i am being alerted that the pole heights have been extended, which is something i didnt know about. So, chair, im respectfully asking to make a motion to continue this item to the call of the chair. The motion has been heard. Let me check in. I want to briefly say i appreciate all the folks that came out today. I know that theres a lot of people that have been pushing this conversation. Its interesting when you leave San Francisco and you look at other areas all around its not as i want to use the word polluted the wires everywhere in our city. The argument about not being able to do it, transmission lines, these are factual in some ways, but in other ways you can argue theyre not. If you go around the bay area you dont see the same level of congestion and wires and other localities. The other frustration i have for our part of town is we essentially have no undergrounding. So same in the richmond. So theres just not much as all or any in our part of town. Then when you do, people will get messages or get a letter from a utility saying if youd like to do this, you can pay 30,000 or 15,000 to have this done on your street. Each individual household our part of town are working families, they dont have that money. I know in the past 170 million was spent to do this. It was through a grant process. The communities organized were able to get it done, but it was not in the southern parts of the city or the southwestern part of the city. So we want to do this. I think its important. I think that scientific studies have shown that Energy Efficiency is increased when you put it underground. Safety is increased when you put it underground. Overall, quality of life is enjoyed when its put underground. So i think theres some good points made today. I think we should further in conversation and bring folks back, but i want to voice that today supervisor fewer i think its exploring our jurisdiction of the lines, not so much the poles, but the lines also. Supervisor walton i think its interesting that cpuc hasnt conducted a study of whether or not underground is safer. But yet we have new developments that are required to use underground utilities. Its interesting and we will have further conversations of course to understand how that could be the case in this point. To your point, supervisor, i want to thank you and supervisor stefani for calling this hearing today. This is happening in other cities. Its definitely happening on new developments right here in San Francisco. So were going to continue to work hard to make this a reality, and you have a commitment from us to do that, which is why were here having this hearing today. With that said, theres been a motion to continue this to the call of the chair. I dont think we have any objecti objection. Without seeing any objection, well move this item to continue to the call of the chair and we seal take this with no objection. With that said, clerk, is there anything else that we have . Clerk theres no further business. Supervisor walton