Speaker 0: And next up is Richard Lindemann. Linda been here? Nope. Okay, then let me go back to the regular agenda. There's been a request. I just want to make sure. Just that we hear this item, because I want to make sure that we're moving all the items up that we have request for item 28, which is the utility wires audit.
Speaker 3: No. Item 28 Communication from Councilwoman Price. Councilmember Super Councilman Austin. Recommendation to request City Manager to report back in 60 days on the feasibility of directing public works to conduct an audit of utility wires throughout the city to identify maintenance needs and violations.
Speaker 8: Okay. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I am encouraging my colleagues to support this item tonight. Throughout the city of Long Beach, you can see large collections of utility wires crisscrossing streets, alleys and over residences. Often these wires are wrapped in bundles, hanging from telephone poles or tied to other wires. Sometimes these wires are tangled among tree branches or appear in disrepair and have been left and removed when a previous business or residential tenant has moved out. Violations of maintenance standards by the utility provider can cause safety concerns, including increased risk of fire, high wind, disconnecting, poorly maintained wires, tree branches causing service interruptions and downed power lines , resulting in damage to private property. Additionally, utility wires that are not well-maintained create visual blight throughout our city and can contribute to the overall deterioration of a community. Individual resident groups have begun conducting their own evaluations of wire issues like these and have begun documenting these maintenance and safety concerns with only volunteer time and expertize. This effort is severely limited and I want to acknowledge the Belmont Heights Community Association for taking a leadership role in bringing this issue to light. This issue could be addressed more comprehensively if city departments were to conduct an audit of major and minor corridors, alleys and other areas to assess the locations of maintenance issues and safety concerns with the goal of providing this information to the utility providers, as well as the California Public Utilities Commission. Most recently, we've seen fire danger that has spread throughout Southern California. And if we have ways to identify fire risks, such as abandoned wires in areas that can cause fires, we should be addressing those and addressing them as a public safety and public health issue. Long Beach is a beautiful and amazing city, but there's always room for improvement and taking more action to maintain something we all see every day, like utility wires, is something we can do to improve everyone's safety as well as make residents feel better about their community. Sure there is. This is not the biggest issue facing Long Beach today. That's definitely clear. But this is another way that we can continue to work to make sure Long Beach residents feel proud of their neighborhood and that we minimize the risk of fire danger in our communities. So with that, I'd ask my colleagues to support this item, and I know we do have some public comment on this item tonight.
Speaker 0: Thank you. I want to go to a public comment or councilman, you want to go first?
Speaker 6: Well, I'll just say I second the motion. I think this is a very responsible item coming forward. And I want to thank Councilmember Price for bringing it forward and asking me to sign on as a coauthor. I think this is the only concern I have is whether or not 60 days is long enough for for this order to actually happen and what sort of proactive efforts will staff make once they find hazards out there so that. My comments, but I'll be happy to support this.
Speaker 0: Okay. Let me go and do public comment then.
Speaker 2: Hello.
Speaker 9: My name is Sydney Simon. I live at 4115 East Second Street and I am wholeheartedly in support of this agenda item. Um, I have been interested in this issue for a long time and 202,013 I wrote an article for the Belmont Heights Community Association newsletter about the egregious wires going all over my driveway, patio, backyard, everywhere, and people just came out of the woodwork on this issue and everybody was interested in working on it. So we developed a team to go out and survey our our neighborhood using the criteria of if there were. We called out locations of lines that were more than two lines going to one house, low drooping lines, and the big rat's nest of wires that's at the at the poles. We filed a complaint with the CPSC, sending in our survey pictures, supporting letters signed by nine other community associations. And we were told that we had no standing unless it was on our property. We couldn't contact the service CPSC. So I just kept going up on their organizational chart until I finally found a fill in as Mr. Fill In, it says, was a program director of consumer affairs for CPSC, and he sent out their chief engineer to meet with us to go over the survey and to meet with Verizon and Charter. He called out many infractions that the charter companies had done and the CPSC sent a notice to Verizon to fix them and they basically refused. So the engineer said that he would send it to their legal department. Well, they heard nothing back. So a year later, we wrote a letter to the city attorney asking for help if he could contact. And it was eventually turned over to. Two, Art Sanchez, who is deputy city attorney, taking care of those issues. And he sent an email to the CPSC general counsel asking to be enlightened on what has happened. And we got no answer at all at that point. We had a meeting with Diana Tang and Art Sanchez, and at Councilwoman Price's suggestion, it was turned over to the legislative state committee here. And we have heard nothing more about that. So so anyway, I want to say, I don't 100% support having a survey for the whole city. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you so much next week for please.
Speaker 9: Good evening. My name is Diane Sundstrom. My address is on file. I also live in Belmont Heights. I'm a board member of the community association and I'm Sidney sidekick.
Speaker 8: In this effort.
Speaker 9: And I also want to encourage the council to support this motion. I think it's very important. And to add on to Sidney's comments, when Verizon refused to comply with the CPU Seas directive to correct safety violations, we decided to go to the PUC.
Speaker 8: Hearing in August of.
Speaker 9: 2015 that related to the Verizon Frontier transfer. And I spoke about Verizon's refusal to comply. And as one would expect, there was a flurry of activity after that meeting, but that was not sustained. So we continued, as Sidney said, speaking to the city, Diana Tang was very involved. Councilwoman Pryce And eventually we also talked to Congressman O'Donnell's office and met with Senator Laura. And our meeting with Senator Laura.
Speaker 8: Ended up in another meeting with the.
Speaker 9: CP you see in our community this year. And as a result of that, again, representatives from all the offices I just mentioned came as well as, again, Raffi Stepanian, who's the.
Speaker 8: C's chief engineer.
Speaker 9: And also Elizaveta Malashenko, who's the director of safety and.
Speaker 8: Enforcement.
Speaker 9: At the CP. You see, and it was very clear from that meeting that wire safety.
Speaker 8: In other words.
Speaker 9: Wires that are not compliant as well as wire blight is still a very big issue.
Speaker 8: In the city.
Speaker 9: Rafi stood at the corner of a street between between Roswell and Examiner.
Speaker 8: On third and in his line of vision. And I quote him There are many safety violations.
Speaker 9: So Elizaveta, after.
Speaker 8: That meeting, sent us an email copying Diana Tang and others.
Speaker 9: And said that there are a couple of proceedings that would be of interest and that would likely result in some action. And one of those is a combined poor management proceeding.
Speaker 8: In other words, creating a.
Speaker 9: Shared database or a statewide census, which might be beyond our ability at this point of utility poles and conduits.
Speaker 8: And conduits, meaning.
Speaker 9: Wires. So again, it's become very.
Speaker 8: Apparent.
Speaker 9: In discussions with the CP, you see that safety as well as wire blight are a major problem. It's also clear that as a small community organization, we have no clout or nor influence. So we fully support and encourage passing Councilwoman.
Speaker 8: Price's.
Speaker 9: Motion. It's a recommended course of action from the CP you see and does have the potential to effect change.
Speaker 8: Thank you very.
Speaker 3: Much.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. And our last speaker on this topic and then we'll go back to the council.
Speaker 4: Good evening, Dave Shukla on file. I'd like to thank my councilwoman and Mrs. Price.
Speaker 5: As well as Councilman Austin for bringing this forward.
Speaker 0: It's a tremendously important move for safety, to assess.
Speaker 5: The fire risk as well as possible explosion risk from the electrical transmission conduits, the infrastructure that we have, the transmission lines. I'd like to make just a couple of quick suggestions to improve this process, because I think it's very important and I hope you all support it. The first is pulling together the volunteer efforts of the HCA and others into a database, as suggested, even if it's just for the city. This info that that data shouldn't just be shared with the investor owned utilities and the CPU only, but it should definitely be shared with the three companies that we're contracting with to perform a feasibility study for a community choice aggregation program. And it should also be shared with the neighborhood associations and residents who live with these fire risks and potential for explosions from the undergrounding, as we've seen in more than one place in the city, certainly downtown over the.
Speaker 0: Past couple of years.
Speaker 5: And it should be expanded to include the type of.
Speaker 4: Alliance.
Speaker 5: Electric as well. We've heard a lot about telecom. Electric, you know, long distance transmission lines from generation telecom, the conditional use permit for putting telecom infrastructure, cable, DSL, cell phones, whatever it is on existing electrical infrastructure. And also looking at potentially the undergrounding. And if a city wide map or citywide database of all of this risk can be achieved, we should take the time to do it right. If that means take. 120 days. 220 days. This may be the first and best opportunity you have to completely understand before we have a precipitous development.
Speaker 0: What our full set of risks are, I think. Thank you. Without. Go back to the council. Councilman Pierce.
Speaker 9: I just want to thank my colleagues for this. I know this is a big issue in my district. We've had several neighborhood associations from Rose Park to Alamo Speech that have called on these issues and however much time it takes of it, 60 days or 120 days. We fully support this and want to thank everyone for bringing this forward.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilwoman Gonzalez.
Speaker 8: Yes, thank you, Councilmember Price, for bringing this forward. And we do have this on the state legislative agenda. I know Councilmember Austin chairs that. And there's under local control and our priorities, we have them both to support policies that will ensure that blight is eliminated relative to utility wires. Aside from that, I have a question that's probably not within this ordinance, but it just came up in a downtown community meeting. And it was the the it's more of a private issue, but I don't know if we have an answer for it now, but it's the cable or satellite dishes that are that exist on these buildings . And we have a multitude of them in downtown that could also pose a major risk. And I don't know if there's any sort of. Incentive or something that we can do to to get these removed, because a lot of the downtown residents, they move into these places that already have satellite dishes. And not only is it blight, but it could pose another issue. I don't know if we have an answer for that right now. If not, I can maybe just do another item.
Speaker 11: While we're doing this, we can also research the possibility of looking at the dish satellites that may have been abandoned and are still there and stuff. But there's certainly a lot that have been abandoned and we'll take a look at those.
Speaker 8: To create may add a friendly amendment to do that. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Speaker 0: Thank you. There is a motion and a second on the item. A roll call vote, please.
Speaker 3: Councilwoman Gonzales. Councilmember Pierce. Councilwoman Price. Councilmember Superman II. Councilwoman Mongo.
Speaker 9: I.
Speaker 3: Vice Mayor Andrews. Councilmember Miranda.
Speaker 1: Art.
Speaker 3: Councilman Austin. Councilmember Richardson.
Recommendation to request City Manager to report back in 60 days on the feasibility of directing Public Works, and/or other City staff to conduct an audit of utility wires throughout the City to identify maintenance needs and violations, as well as safety concerns in order to better address these issues with the utility providers and the California Public Utilities Commission.