The city will pay $2,000 to repair a fence that East Third
Street homeowners say was damaged during a Third Street Promenade
project.
The city will pay $2,000 to repair a fence that East Third Street homeowners say was damaged during a Third Street Promenade project.
The Dasovics, a family that owns four homes on East Third, and the city couldn’t come up with a mutually agreeable right-of-entry agreement so city contractors could place the utility lines leading to their homes underground. Instead, the city installed three poles in front of their homes.
Now, the Dasovics say the construction work caused damage to the fence surrounding 75 E. Third St. and that the power lines leading from 57 E. Third St. to one of the poles dangles too close to the porch, which Diane Dasovic told the Morgan Hill City Council Wednesday night makes it impossible to prune their vines and causes a safety hazard.
The Dasovics believe there’s also a possibility the electrical lines could damage the home. And the city has not promised they could rebuild if said damage destroys the home. The property is no longer zoned for residential.
City officials say that the power lines are PG&E’s responsibility. Diane Dasovic told the Morgan Hill City Council Wednesday night that she’d been told by a PG&E official that she should take it up with the city.
The city will pay for the fence damage that the family believes was caused by a trench dug during the project. City Manager Ed Tewes said the repair would probably cost “no more than a couple thousand dollars.” The city has not claimed responsibility for the damage, and is waiting to hear back from Diane Dasovic about when they can gain access to the property to repair it, according to Deputy Public Works Director Karl Bjarke.
As for the power lines, Bjarke said, “The city considers it to be a safe installation.”
The city has made a request to PG&E to make sure it’s “a safe installation, according to PG&E’s overhang rules and regulations,” Bjarke said.
The $4 million Third Street Promenade Project will reconfigure the street as a pedestrian promenade featuring wide sidewalks, decorative street furniture, pedestrian street lights and new landscapes, much like Santa Monica’s famed thoroughfare.
The $400,000 second phase of the construction project was to move all overhead power lines underground, to beautify the street.
Construction is scheduled to begin on the project on June 8, It is scheduled for completion by the end of December.
The Dasovics are still seeking a few things: underground utilities for their four homes, a pledge that the city would be financially responsible for any damages during the project, and a promise that if one or all of their homes were somehow destroyed during the project, they would be allowed to rebuild although zoning no longer permits residences there.
But the city is unwavering. Rather than delaying the utility undergrounding project to clear the air with the Dasovics, the city went forward with its original timeline in March. The city’s contractors literally worked around the four homes in question, placing three poles right at the property line to service the Dasovics.
The Dasovics have expressed frustration over this, saying the city could have held off until a mutually agreeable right-of-entry agreement, possibly including additional insurance to assuage the Dasovics’ concerns, was reached.
The city has already spent almost $40,000 in additional costs to work around the Dasovics’ homes. The family still want the utilities undergrounded on the city’s dime, with current estimates of about $48,000, plus $9,000 for PG&E work.
It would have cost about $8,500 to underground the utilities during the original project.
During the council meeting, a visibly frustrated Dasovic again asserted that had the city been more cooperative, all utilities could be underground on East Third. Dasovic was taken aback by Tewes’s assertion that the power lines were safer now than they were before.
“That’s ridiculous. They’re terrible. They’re hanging now,” Dasovic exclaimed. She went on to say that her family wasn’t responsible for the extra cost spent to add the utility poles in the first place.
“A lot of this could have been avoided. But we are where we are … If there’s damage to more than 50 percent of the house, I can’t rebuild my house … I would have to tear my house down. It doesn’t seem very fair.”
Mayor Steve Tate cut Dasovic off, saying that public comment had already ended, she’d expended her three minutes, and they’d “heard all of these things before.”
