Santa Clara County is right to take a closer look at PG&E’s controversial plan for a new South County substation, according to the lawyer brought in to fight the utility giant.
Bruce Tichinin said he is “very pleased” that a the Housing, Land Use, Environment and Transportation Committee of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors agreed at a Dec. 14 hearing to order the county planning staff to review the PG&E plan for consistency with county environmental policy and to study a resolution of opposition he prepared for possible adoption by the full board.
“I find it all but incomprehensible that PG&E would say in one breath that it will use
impacts on (the environment) as a criterion for choosing and eliminating sites, and in the same breath they have chosen these three sites, all of which would be ecological catastrophes; I am shocked,” Tichinin said Monday.
The committee response shows that its Chairman, Supervisor Dave Cortese, President of the Board of Supervisors, and District 1 Supervisor Mike Wasserman “are clearly taking the issues raised by CHEER seriously,” Tichinin said.
“And since I believe that CHEER has an ironclad case for elimination of these three (of eight) sites, I am hopeful the committee members and ultimately the board of supervisors will adopt either this resolution or one like it that eliminates the three sites that will be environmental catastrophes if they are chosen,” he said.
Tichinin was hired to take the substation fight to PG&E by the Gilroy-based nonprofit conservation group Coastal Habitat Education and Environmental Education, or CHEER. The group works to protect, maintain and conserve 1,800 square miles of riparian ecosystems and their wild species in the Pajaro River watershed, with special attention to the federally protected, ocean-going steelhead trout.
Citing numerous environmental concerns about PG&E’s designation of three rural South County parcels as potential sites for the 10-acre substation, the Tichinin resolution, if adopted, would put the county government on record as opposing those sites.
It also would demand that PG&E “immediately” issue a written statement saying that is has “permanently removed” the sites from consideration for its South County Power Connect Project.
By early next year, PG&E will choose one preferred and two alternative sites and ask the California Public Utilities Commission for permission to build on one of them.
Rural residents, and CHEER, have expressed outrage with the inclusion of pristine rural land on the list of potential sites and have threatened legal action to protect the land.
CHEER believes each of the trio of sites noted in the Tichinin resolution is too environmentally and culturally fragile to support a power substation and more high voltage line towers needed to serve the facility.
Garcia said his hope is that the committee will forward the Tichinin resolution to the Board of Supervisors with a recommendation for adoption and that the board will agree.
The Cortese-Wasserman committee is scheduled to review a staff report on the matter and revisit the issue at its Jan. 19, 2017 meeting.
To learn more about PG&E’s South County Power Connect Project, go to this website:http://bit.ly/2bvqisi.
