A community meeting was held on the Carriage Hills Capital Electric Lines Rebuild Project on January 10, 2019 in the Town Board Room. Crews will begin the project in February by replacing the 3-phase lines running between Larkspur and Spruce Avenues southward towards Ponderosa Avenue and then towards Fish Creek Road. The Light & Power department gave a 20 minute presentation and took questions from the audience. The following questions and answers are from this meeting.
- Will any lines be buried during this project? No, all lines that are currently overhead are planned to remain overhead.
- Can a group of residents have secondary lines buried that run behind their properties? On request, L&P will underground the single-phase secondary lines for a group of residents. The customers requesting the undergrounding would be responsible for paying for it.
- Will there be any additional tree trimming? There may be some spot trimming or removals once the crews get out there and start working. However, the major tree work for this project was done over the fall. L&P has a Customer Tree Replacement Program. Contact Sarah Clark at 970-577-3627 for more information.
- Can we have the service lines to our home buried during this project? This work would be done by L&P at the homeowner’s expense. This may require the installation of a new service panel, which would require an electrician. It would be best to coordination your project with L&P’s other work in your area.
- Can we keep the poles removed during the project? Most definitely. Anyone wanting to keep the poles should talk to the crew while they are there doing the work. It was noted that poles that have telecommunications on them will remain in place after L&P has set a new pole until the telecom company transfers their equipment and lines.
- There will be no outages longer than 4 hours. L&P will give plenty of notice (about a week) before moving into each area. Check their website for the latest project status. This project will continue throughout 2019 and many of the planned outages will take place during the summer.
- All transformers will be replaced and 16 trip-savers will be installed to replace existing fuses in the lines. This will reduce outages and speed repair efforts.
- Why is this being done now? L&P selects capital improvement areas based on outage frequency and severity. This project was originally on their schedule for 2020 and was moved up a year to better correspond with the planned expansion of their smart grid system. If the Town Board decided to implement a municipal broadband utility, this system would be able to accommodate that as well.
For further information contact Sarah Clark, L&P Administrative Assistant, at 970-557-3627 or sclark@estes.org. The meeting was recorded and can be viewed at www.estes.org/videos. More information and project status updates can be found at www.estes.org/electriccapitalimprovements.
