Northwest property owners balk at utilities ‘undergrounding’ plan
Cape Coral officials were back in the northwest Cape again Thursday evening, expaining a plan to bury electric and cable television lines underground in the neighborhood. Those in attendance weren’t buying into the plan.
Six months after meeting with area property owners at Christa McAuliffe Charter Elementary School to discuss the project, assistant Cape Coral city manager Mike Ilczyszyn was back in front of a skeptical crowd to explain the proposal.
Between 150 and 200 people nearly filled the school’s cafeteria as Ilczyszyn went over the basics of the proposal, and included financial information the city had gained since a June public meeting.
“I absolutely have no opinion about the project,” Ilczyszyn said as to whether the project should move ahead. “I really don’t.”
The city’s plan is tied to the approaching expansion of water and sewer services to the area, which will begin next spring in the “North 2” neighborhoods generally bordered on the west by Old Burnt Store Road, north of Pine Island Road, on the east by Burnt Store Road and on the north by Bonefish Canal. It includes four of the Seven Islands.
As Ilczyszyn put it, the ideal time for undergrounding electric and cable lines would be before an area is developed. The second-best time is when the ground is going to be churned up anyway due to the UEP’s water and sewer construction.
That time begins next March or April and runs for about two years.
“This was a matter of when would be the best time to put lines underground,” Ilczyszyn said. “This happened to be the best time to bring it forward to an area that we thought might like it.
“Those who came tonight, you can obviously see that they’re not for it.”
The Utility Expansion Project was of biggest reasons those at the hearing Thursday spoke against the plan. Already facing about $19,000 in assessments for the UEP, they balked at paying thousands more to add cable and electric to the underground project.
The Lee County Electric Cooperative, Comcast and CenturyLink all declined to contribute to the cost of the undergrounding, Ilczyszyn said.
Ilczyszyn said the city had determined that the electric and cable project would cost slightly less than had been estimated in June at between $6,000 and $8,000 per property. After discussion with LCEC officials, the city refined its estimate to between $5,744 and $7,620 per vacant lot. Projected annual assessments for all property owners were now projected to be between $650 and $850.
The city plans to offer a 15-year loan program for property owners to pay for the project.
Ilczyszyn said part of the proposal is to use a “synthetic TIF” plan, which would use projected additional tax revenues from property appreciation to help pay down the cost. He said very conservative projections were used in estimating the synthetic tax increment financing ‘s tax benefits.
Area property owners will be mailed ballots in a non-binding referendum the first week of January and will have until Jan. 31, 2017 to return them. There will be one vote per parcel of land regardless of the property’s size.
Several opponents at Thursday’s meeting most of whom spoke their piece and left before the hearing was over were skeptical of the city’s intentions and integrity. They feared that a “no” vote would be non-binding on a City Council that could approve the plan anyway.
While Ilczyszyn said that, should less than 50 percent plus one vote be in favor, the city staff would not recommend that City Council go ahead with the plan, many remembered the council approved the UEP despite widespread public opposition.
Ilczyszyn said that the council had legal authority under the state constitution to go ahead with the project even if the referendum fails, but he did not expect that to occur.
While the UEP was considered a vital project that added water and sewer to properties that had been on wells and septic tanks, this is an optional thing since electric and cable lines are already in place. Undergrounding would not add anything new, which was the city’s driving force in pushing UEP through, but would simply change from power poles to trenches.
Some of those speaking Thursday night worried that underground lines would be more expensive and difficult to repair.
On the other hand, Ilczyszyn said that the undergrounding project would substantially increase the pace of adding street lights to an area where they currently are few and far between.
Another objection was related to the proposed development of the city-owned Seven Islands. Not only were those in attendance concerned about effects of that development, which could contain high-rise structures, but that the undergrounding plan was being pushed more for the benefit of Seven Islands than for the neighborhood as a whole.
“Based on what I heard numerous times tonight that there’s a lot of buildup on the amount of things that are happening in the northwest (Cape),” Ilczyszyn said. “You have Burnt Store Road widening, which is sure to drive commercial development. You have the Seven Islands, which is going to drive commercial development. You have the water and sewer. So there’s lot of changes in the northwest right now, and I think some of the sentiment you heard tonight is that ‘it’s too fast, it’s too much. We’ve got to slow this down’.”
And, Ilczyszyn said, while those in attendance Thursday night were vocal, they were only a fraction of those who own property in the area.
“If I were to look at it based on those who were in the room tonight, I might go back and tell somebody who asked me a city council member, the city manager that based on the people in the room, no. But clearly when there’s 1,800 parties and there’s only a hundred or 200 here, I don’t know. There’s 1,600 other votes out there.”