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Alpine Town Hall Meeting to
focus on Powerlink’s impact
Supervisor Dianne Jacob will speak
Thursday, Jan. 14, 6 – 8 p.m.
Alpine Community Center
ALPINE — Business and property owners, tenants and
leasees along Alpine Boulevard are being urged to attend a
critical Alpine Town Hall Meeting this Thursday, Jan. 14, about
the impact of undergrounding Sunrise Powerlink electrical lines
in the community.
San Diego Gas & Electric Co. is scheduled to start
placing two 230-kilovolt feeder electrical transmission lines
beneath Alpine Boulevard in May. The massive $200-million
project could affect the community’s main east-west street for
almost two years, according to SDG&E.
East County Supervisor Dianne Jacob will speak about
the impact on Alpine at Thursday’s informational meeting,
scheduled from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Alpine Community Center, 1830
Alpine Blvd.
“I’ve never seen anything like that (underground
project). It’s huge,” Jacob said in an interview. “The impact on
property owners along Alpine Boulevard is irreversible. They (SDG&E)
have not thoroughly analyzed the impact that goes along with
this line.” Alpine is the only community along the Powerlink
project from Imperial County to San Diego that will have to deal
with underground construction.
The project calls for two big concrete trenches, three
feet wide by seven feet deep, beneath 6.2 miles of Alpine
Boulevard through the downtown area, according to information
provided by SDG&E at a Dec. 15 meeting the company held in
Alpine.
About 40 underground concrete vaults, each the size of
a 26-foot-long room, will be placed along the Alpine route for
maintenance and operation, the company’s project update said.
Jacob said Thursday’s meeting for the general public
will include concerns and information from county personnel
about the Powerlink project. SDG&E will be invited, said the
county supervisor, encouraging everyone to attend.
The Alpine Sunrise Powerlink Communications Coalition,
consisting of the Alpine Mountain Empire Chamber of Commerce,
the Alpine Planning Group’s Ad Hoc Sunrise Powerlink
Subcommittee and the Alpine Revitalization Committee for
Community Development, has been asking anyone who lives, works
or plays in the Alpine area to go to the meeting.
“The heavy equipment, work crews, dust, noise, etc.
will substantially affect your daily routines, quality of life
and traffic flow; more specifically they will impact your
businesses, the ingress and egress from your properties, and the
safety of you, your families and if (you are) a business
operator, your customers,” the coalition said in its message to
the community.
According to the coalition, it is “in the best
interests of Alpine’s businesses and citizenry to seek project
mitigation that would ultimately make Alpine a better and more
prosperous place to live.”
“Equally important is the necessity to develop programs to
maintain commercial business operations during this nearly
two-year construction period,” said the coalition message.
SDG&E personnel assured people at their December
Powerlink meeting that although parts of Alpine Boulevard will
be down to one lane at times during the undergrounding work, the
street will never be completely closed down and there won’t be
any blasting. “I’m definitely not up here to gloss things over,”
SDG&E project manager Jose Lopez said. “It is construction.
We’re going to have a lot of trucks out on Alpine Boulevard. We
will be working with concrete.”
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