Utility Meeting

Interesting meeting today. The good, the bad and the ugly.

The good:
Xcel and Comcast have no problems with the proposal. They will use the easements we've drawn up. Comcast (and Qwest, who wasn't at today's meeting), will use a joint trench agreement with City Light & Power when they dig to our new property. L&P preference is to put a temporary system in with the road ROW since they won't know exactly when and how Kechter Road will be improved. When the road is improved, then they will put a permanent system in. We won't even need our neighbors to dedicate easements at this time.

We will need to get a letter from Terry Farril from the water district stating that since sewer is not available, we'll be allowed to install a septic system for the new house.

We will also need to get a letter from REA stating that we can change the current REA easements to say utility easements and then include wording to include REA in the utility agreements. They do not need to access our property except to service the pole that our neighbors service is metered off.

The bad:
The ditch easement and the utility easement cannot be on top of each other. Since the ditch easement is a private easement, a private and public easement cannot share the space. So, we'll need to put the 15' utility easement next to the proposed new ROW and then put the 20' ditch easement behind that.

That means we'll need to move our ditch. We can cross the utility easement at 90 degrees, so we're going to try to keep it on our property, but we may need to feather it up and then back on our neighbors properties. I'm hoping to disturb our neighbors as little as possible. Another option is to create the easements, but not move the ditch at this time since the utility easement won't be used until Kechter Road is improved. We could do all the changes at the same time and then also at the same time as our neighbors will be required to make changes.

Miles was concerned about moving the ditch and JR Engineering was concerned about flows and mentioned that we would likely not get our CO (certificate of occupancy) on the new house until it was done. I think this one won't be too huge of a deal, but we'll see. (Kaching...)

The ugly:
Engineering is still maintaining that traffic planning is going to require the road design, escrow and ultimate construction of the sidewalk. Interesting that traffic planning is causing all of the headache, but has never been to one of these meetings. We've got to set up yet another meeting with traffic planning to sort this out.

We will still plan to have our re-submittal on Tuesday, May 6, but may need to move that if we are going to have to provide design for the road and sidewalk. Susan Joy (Engineering) is going to set up another meeting with traffic planning on Friday to sort it out. I'm hoping we can convince them that it just makes no sense. In addition to my concerns to Susan (posted on 4/25), utilities has a problem with the sidewalk because it will be in their way and they will likely break it up when they do their work. (Kaching, kaching...)

More to come on the ugly.