A practical plan to help Lafayette neighborhoods underground their power lines — paid for by the neighbors who want it, unlocked by a City that says yes.
Lafayette's overhead power lines are more than an eyesore. They are the single largest utility-caused wildfire ignition source running through our neighborhoods — the same kind of equipment traced to many of California's most destructive fires. They fail in winter storms, they trigger fire-season shutoffs, and they are a growing reason insurers are non-renewing Lafayette homeowners and pushing families onto the expensive, capped FAIR Plan.
PG&E has told us plainly: Lafayette is not in its wildfire undergrounding program, and there are no plans to add us. If we want the lines buried, we have to do it ourselves — and California law gives us a way. Neighborhoods can form assessment districts under Rule 20B, vote to tax themselves, and pay to convert their own streets. Berkeley, Newport Beach, and neighborhoods across Marin and the Peninsula have done exactly this.
The evidence is consistent and comes from the utilities and regulators themselves:
Wildfire safety. PG&E reports that undergrounding permanently reduces wildfire risk by about 98% in the converted segment, because it removes the overhead ignition source entirely. In Southern California Edison's modeling, undergrounding is the benchmark against which every other mitigation is measured.
Reliability. Underground systems experience roughly 78% fewer outages and 69% less downtime. For hillside streets that lose power in every winter storm and every safety shutoff, that is a daily-life difference.
Property value. Studies associate undergrounding with home values 5–20% higher nearby. Even PG&E's own conservative figure is 2.5–10%.
Insurability. Undergrounding eliminates a leading community-level ignition source — exactly the kind of risk reduction that improves a neighborhood's underwriting profile and supports a return to standard insurance coverage over time.
And to be honest about the cost, because credibility matters: neighbors who choose this typically pay a special assessment on the order of $35,000–$75,000 per home, financed over 15–20 years on the property tax bill — roughly $250–$550 a month. That is real money. Which is why this decision belongs to each neighborhood — by a supermajority petition of the owners, and then a formal ballot of the people who would actually pay — not to City Hall, and not to me.
The wildfire risk is the headline, but it isn't the whole bill. Three costs come due every single year we leave the lines up.
We pay in trees. In January 2025, our own Emergency Preparedness Commission asked PG&E why Lafayette's lines stay overgrown despite all those paint marks. PG&E's answer was that it is "very difficult to remove or prune trees that are not in our ROW but threaten our Circuits, due to push back from various local organizations" — and that the fix could be "creating new local City or Fire Department Ordinances." Read that again. The utility's proposed solution to Lafayette's tree problem is for Lafayette to pass ordinances compelling residents to cut down their trees. Every year. Forever. In a town that loves its canopy as much as this one does, that is a fight without an end. Undergrounding ends the conflict instead of relitigating it each season. PG&E's own materials describe burying lines as avoiding "the year-after-year tree trimming required by overhead line maintenance."
We pay in outages. PG&E told that same Commission it "has not made any significant infrastructure changes to reduce the frequency and impact of Public Safety Power Shutoff events in Lafayette," and that the program remains active. On top of PSPS sits EPSS — settings designed to trip our lines faster and more often all through fire season. Neither program can touch a line that's underground. Of every tool on PG&E's own wildfire list, undergrounding is the only one that permanently exits both.
We pay in generators. Here's the cost nobody puts in a budget. When the power keeps going out, people buy permanent natural-gas standby generators. They're loud — most run a self-test every week — and they burn gas during precisely the days when our air is already smoky, all while the City's Environmental Task Force discusses capping residential gas lines by 2045. They also replace shared resilience with the private kind, available to whoever can afford $15,000. A street where the power simply stays on is safer, quieter, and a better neighborhood than one where half the houses roar to life and half sit dark.
Here's what I've learned leading the Happy Valley undergrounding effort: the neighborhoods willing to pay can't even get a price.
PG&E will not produce a cost estimate — not even a ballpark — until someone delivers a parcel-level boundary map, names a legally responsible applicant, and posts a non-refundable engineering deposit that can run into six figures. No individual homeowner can reasonably be that applicant or carry that risk. But the assessment district that could carry it can't form until neighbors see a price. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, and today the City of Lafayette has no policy for breaking it.
So willing neighborhoods stall for years, and the lines stay up.
I will bring to the Council a simple, citywide policy:
When two-thirds of the property owners within a proposed district sign a petition declaring their willingness to assess themselves for undergrounding, the City of Lafayette shall submit that district's boundary to PG&E as the responsible applicant and backstop PG&E's engineering costs if the assessment district ultimately fails to form.
What this does:
It breaks the deadlock. The City becomes the legally responsible applicant PG&E requires, submits the parcel-level boundary, and gets neighborhoods the real cost estimate they need to make a real decision.
It sets a high bar on purpose. State law asks for nothing like this. Under Proposition 218, a district is approved so long as the ballots in favor — weighted by each owner's share of the assessment — outnumber the ballots against. This policy asks a neighborhood to first produce signatures from two-thirds of its owners: overwhelming, documented, head-counted support, gathered before the City puts anything at stake. The City acts only where failure is unlikely.
It limits the City's exposure to one thing. The backstop covers PG&E's engineering and design costs, and only in the rare case where a neighborhood that already showed two-thirds support fails to confirm its district at the ballot. Construction, financing, and every other cost is borne entirely by the benefiting homeowners through their assessment. This is not a subsidy — it's a guarantee that lets willing neighborhoods get to a vote.
It's a loan, not a grant — and I'll say so plainly. Engineering and district-formation costs are "incidental expenses" under state law, which means they can be built into the assessment itself and repaid from bond proceeds when the district closes its financing. In the ordinary course, the City advances the engineering deposit, carries it for roughly twelve to twenty-four months while the engineer's report, the Proposition 218 ballot, and the bond sale run their course, and is paid back in full by the property owners. Net cost to the City in a successful district: zero. I won't pretend the carry period isn't a real commitment — it is. But the City's own five-year forecast projects a General Fund balance of $18.1 million at the close of FY 2025-26, equal to 80% of General Fund expenditures, and still 68% five years out. That forecast also shows modest annual operating deficits, and I'd rather say so than have someone else point it out — but a reimbursable advance is not an operating expense. It's cash out and a receivable in, repaid at bond closing, and it never touches the structural picture. The reserve exists, in the City's own words, to buffer against unanticipated events including wildfire. Advancing about one percent of it, recoverably, to permanently remove ignition sources from our streets is roughly what that money is for.
And it can be built to renew itself. Lafayette already runs dedicated sinking funds for the library and the community center roof. A modest Undergrounding Engineering Revolving Fund — seeded once, drawn when a district's engineering advance comes due, replenished when that district's bonds close — would let a single appropriation serve one neighborhood after another. The City's exposure would never exceed that fund's balance.
And the Council keeps every option. Some California cities require the neighbors to post the deposit themselves. Lafayette could choose that too. I don't recommend it: making residents put six figures at risk before they're even allowed to learn the price rebuilds the exact wall this policy is meant to knock down, and two-thirds of owners signing their names is already serious evidence of commitment. But that's a Council judgment, and the policy works either way.
It may cost the City nothing at all. California cities are collectively sitting on roughly $950 million in unused Rule 20A utility credits. Lafayette should determine its residual balance — under PG&E's own rules, those credits can be applied to a district's engineering advance by City resolution.
This is not a Happy Valley policy. It is a standing offer to every neighborhood in Lafayette — and its benefits don't stop at any district's boundary. A fire ignited on one street doesn't check parcel maps. Every converted segment removes an ignition source near shared evacuation routes, reduces the shutoffs and outages that ripple across circuits, strengthens the insurance story for the whole community, and protects a tax base we all depend on. The homeowners pay for the pipes and wires; the whole city shares the safety.
Look at what this one policy activates. A single 100-home district at typical assessments represents $3.5 to $7.5 million of private homeowner money invested directly into safer public infrastructure — plus PG&E's own construction spending, plus the telecom and cable conversions that ride along in the same trench. Multiply that across every Lafayette neighborhood willing to reach two-thirds support, and this policy could mobilize tens of millions of dollars of non-City investment in hardening our streets against wildfire.
No bond measure. No parcel tax on residents who opt out. No draw on the general fund. The City's entire role is a limited engineering guarantee — likely covered by utility credits Lafayette may already hold — that unlocks private capital at a scale the City budget could never match. Few policies available to this Council convert so little public risk into so much invested infrastructure.
"Will my taxes pay for someone else's undergrounding?" No. Construction is funded entirely by the district's homeowners. The City advances the engineering deposit and is reimbursed from the assessment when the district forms — a loan, not a gift. Its only real exposure is if a district with demonstrated two-thirds support then fails at the ballot, and even that may be covered by existing utility credits rather than the general fund.
"Isn't this PG&E's responsibility?" PG&E maintains the lines, but under state rules it will not fund conversion here, and the ratepayer-funded program that once did is being wound down. Waiting for PG&E means waiting forever. This plan uses the process that actually exists.
"Why should the City be involved at all?" Because the process is legally impossible without a responsible public applicant, and because wildfire risk, evacuation safety, and insurability are city problems, not just neighborhood problems.
Neighborhoods across Lafayette are ready to invest their own money to make their streets safer, more reliable, and more beautiful. They're not asking the City for a handout — they're asking for a partner who can unlock the door. As your Councilmember, I'll make sure Lafayette says yes.
[Sign the Happy Valley petition] [Read the full Fact Book] [Volunteer]
Figures drawn from CPUC, PG&E, SCE, City of Berkeley, and California Department of Insurance public sources; see the Happy Valley Undergrounding Fact Book (May 2026) for citations. Assessment figures are regional benchmarks — district-specific costs come from PG&E's estimate.
