Tucson Electric Power Co. is once again trying to install new high-voltage transmission lines through midtown.
The utility’s previous attempts to erect 110-foot-tall power poles that would connect three substations across central Tucson has drawn strong criticism in the past from historic neighborhoods concerned about visual blight and decreased property values.
While TEP’s latest plan now skirts around some of the previously impacted neighborhoods, such as Sam Hughes, several, including Jefferson Park, remain along the proposed route, joined by other areas, like the West University neighborhood, that weren’t previously subjected to it.
TEP maintains that undergrounding the lines as previously proposed by neighborhood stakeholders is cost prohibitive.
On July 8, a public hearing will be held at 5:30 p.m. at the DoubleTree Hotel-Reid Park, 445 S. Alvernon Way, where TEP’s application will be reviewed by the Arizona Power Plant and Transmission Line Siting Committee, the utility said in a news release.
If the line-siting committee approves the plan, it will issue a certificate of environmental compatibility that will be forwarded to the Arizona Corporation Commission for final consideration. The ACC must sign off on this before TEP is allowed to begin building its overhead transmission lines.
The preferred route
TEP’s “Midtown Reliability Project” will connect three substations across central Tucson via 12 miles of 138-kilovolt transmission lines, suspended by 110-foot-tall poles.
At a glance, the project would connect the DeMoss-Petrie Substation, near Interstate 10 and East Grant Road, to the proposed-Vine Substation, which would be just north of the University of Arizona and Banner University Medical Center. Finally, TEP would route transmission lines to the Kino Substation, located near South Kino Parkway and East 36th Street.
TEP says that they had 24 potential routes to choose from, but designated one — “B4” — as the preferred route in their application to the ACC.
“(The application) does identify a preferred route … (but) we’ve said this several times, none of these routes are perfect,” said Joe Barrios on Friday, a spokesman for TEP. “We are essentially including all (those possible routes and) we’re saying to the committee, and the Commission, that all of these routes are viable, we can build on any of them.”
Route B4 connects the DeMoss-Petrie to the proposed-Vine Substation via Grant Road, turning onto North Park Avenue, then on East Adams Street and finally onto North Vine Avenue. The Vine Substation would be located north of Banner UMC. Although there is currently a 46-kilovolt substation located there, Barrios said, “because it’s a 138-kilovolt line, we’d have to perform some upgrades on the site to accommodate” the 138-kilovolt lines.
A car heads north on Park Avenue near Grant, along part of the proposed route of TEP’s Midtown Reliability Project.
To connect the Vine and Kino substations, transmission lines would run on Vine, Adams and Park Avenue, “before turning on East Speedway Boulevard and then on South Euclid Avenue,” according to the utility. After crossing Aviation, “the route continues on South Tool Avenue, Euclid and 36th Street,” connecting to the Kino Substation, TEP said in its release.
TEP has said in the past that the project is necessary to meet growing peak demand needs in the midtown area, including the UA.
“Upgraded systems will replace antiquated 46 (kilovolt) sub-transmission and lower-voltage distribution systems that have served central Tucson for more than 50 years,” TEP says. “With an upgraded 138 kV system, TEP estimates that up to eight 46 kV substations and up to 19 miles of overhead sub-transmission lines will be removed over 10 years.”
‘It does not make economic sense’
TEP’s Midtown Reliability Project, and its potential route, have been a source of contention for community members, city officials and the like for years.
Betsy Larson, president of the West University Neighborhood Association (WUNA), says that this route down Euclid has been known to be a possibility since the project’s inception. However, once the Euclid route was identified as the preferred route, she said, communication to the neighborhood became brief.
“We really have not been engaged by TEP, not as thoroughly as I would have expected or hoped,” Larson said. “I haven’t felt true, sincere transparency from TEP, or true sincere outreach.”
Larson’s neighborhood, West University, is bounded by Speedway Boulevard on the north, Park Avenue on the east, Sixth Street on the south and Stone Avenue on the west, according to the city. TEP’s 100-plus-foot poles would cut straight through the community, which was designated a historic neighborhood in 1980.
Another aspect she felt that TEP didn’t have a firm grasp on were the “unique circumstances” of Euclid Avenue. Primarily, that West University is just one of the few Tucson neighborhoods designated as a historic preservation zone, which she says, in theory, should deter new development from the area.
“There are very firm guidelines in place to preserve our historic (neighborhood),” she told the Star. “If we have too many changes within our neighborhood, we lose that designation, so it’s really, really important that we maintain all those requirements.”
Larson said that, to her, lower construction costs and the most-direct route for TEP seems to be the driving factors for taking Euclid. But the desire for undergrounding is still there, Larson said, and that a solution must come from the utility’s end, not at the expense of customers.
Fortis, Inc., which completed its buyout of TEP in 2014, owns subsidiaries in Canada, the U.S. and the Caribbean. According to Fortis, the company serves approximately 3.5 million “utility customers” and holds $68 billion in “total assets.”
“So, to pass the buck onto users, I think (that argument) is a fallacy,” Larson told the Star. “TEP is always going to try to do the cheapest option and at some point, as a community we need to figure out, ‘well, is corporate greed acceptable? And at what point do we say enough is enough?’”
Underground Arizona, a nonprofit advocating for undergrounding electric utilities, references Arizona Public Service Company, which found that “for every $10 million in underground expenses, it costs ratepayers 0.003% in increased rates.”
“Under the best case scenario, underground electric lines save ratepayers money by reducing up front land costs, long-term maintenance and repair costs, and increasing safety and reliability,” the nonprofit says.
Larson says that visual blight, drops in property values, construction time and noise, in addition to the already-busy corridor that Euclid is, are all sources of concern for West University residents.
“It’s disruptive, and people are expected to be living directly under these lines, and it’s not just our neighborhood,” Larson said. “ Speedway is a welcoming street into our city, and the UA is such a central hub of economic fuel for Tucson …. It does not make economic sense.”
“It’s not just property values and safety, or you know, sightline issues of our economic hub in Tucson. It’s all of it. It’s the whole package that is the problem.”
Steve Kozachik, Tucson’s former councilman for Ward 6, was at the center of this project, and its backlash, during his time on city council. Still a resident of Ward 6 and living within the project’s target area, he says that the project continues to ignore the community at-large.
“Sadly, as proposed it ignores the well-established historic neighborhoods it’ll impact, ignores the community interest in undergrounding, and ignores the fact that soon they’ll have to get community approval for a new franchise agreement,” Kozachik said in a statement to the Star.
“From a strategic and community relations standpoint I think they might want to reconsider. They might have luck with the ACC but they still need community support for the franchise agreement.”
Jefferson Park neighborhood, which was included in TEP’s last proposed route, found itself again in the crosshairs of the utility’s latest iteration.
The Jefferson Park Neighborhood Association told the Arizona Daily Star on Friday that the “gigantic” 100-foot poles and overhead lines “run counter to all the efforts to safeguard this unique part of Tucson.”
“Due to the ill-conceived location of the proposed Vine Substation, an imposing structure looming at the very edge of our area and in the center of two residential neighborhoods, towering transmission structures and lines coming into and exiting from the substation have always been projected to run through Jefferson Park in one form or another,” the association said.
Jefferson Park’s boundaries are Grant Road on the north, Campbell to the east, Lester Street on the south and Euclid Avenue to the west.
“While we understood, and still do, that the transmission line project will shore up aging infrastructure and provide needed additional electrical capacity for central Tucson, we question and strongly oppose overhead lines in our area and anywhere else in the heart of the city,” the association said.
“If these unsightly lines are permitted to be over headed through our community, and the greater Tucson city center, it will damage the historic integrity, the property values, and the viewshed not just of our neighborhood but also of a string of other neighborhoods. Thousands of Tucsonans will be gravely harmed.”
How we got here
When the utility first proposed its initial route in 2020, it planned to connect the Vine and Kino substations via the east edge of the UA, running overhead lines along North Campbell Avenue and adjacent to several historic Tucson neighborhoods.
Larson echoed a lot of what leaders of neighborhoods along the previous route have said in the past, while city officials have said previously the plan would violate city ordinances that ban new, overhead transmission lines on designated “scenic” and “gateway” corridors, as previously reported by the Star.
In August 2021, a city zoning administrator determined that “the requirement to underground utilities within a Gateway Corridor Zone as indicated” in the city’s code applies to the project, according to a November 2023 court filing in Pima County Superior Court.
In September 2021, TEP appealed the zoning administrator’s decision to the city’s Board of Adjustment.
The project and its Campbell route were put on hold in early 2022 to allow more time for negotiations with the city and other stakeholders. Then, in June 2022, Tucson’s planning commission approved amendments to the city’s Uniform Development Code, which prohibited overhead power lines along city-designated scenic and gateway corridors.
This change was done “to avoid the costly undergrounding process in city-designated scenic and gateway corridors under certain conditions,” the Star previously reported.
This was good news for TEP, since the city’s Board of Adjustment previously required the utility to underground its transmission lines within the Campbell corridor.
The 2022 code amendments also allowed TEP to appeal the prior decision, but in October 2023, the Board of Adjustment voted to uphold its and the zoning administrator’s denials, according to the Nov. 21 court filing.
The suit, which TEP filed against the city and the Board of Adjustment, is asking the court to overturn the city’s denial. Their argument is based on state law, and the fact that the city has allowed for such overhead lines in the past, for instance when they allowed TEP to “build overhead 138(-kilovolt) transmission lines along South Kolb Road” within a gateway corridor, TEP argued in its court filing.
Kozachik, the former councilman, said on Thursday that TEP still has options if they lose in court.
“TEP is still waiting on the court to tell them the city ordinance related to undergrounding on gateway corridors is valid. If they lose that, and they should, they’ve got this fall back position headed for the Corporation Commission,” Kozachik said.
“… the zoning examiner still has to approve the site. He has already denied it once because he didn’t know the downstream impacts. Once he sees how the above ground poles will impact the surrounding neighborhoods he may deny it again and TEP is back at square one.”
In May 2023, TEP and the city failed in its attempt to persuade residents to pass Proposition 412, a franchise agreement which would’ve added fees to TEP customers to fund the underground installation of transmission lines.
TEP has said undergrounding would be prohibitively expensive, and that they wouldn’t pay for the difference or seek to increase its state-regulated general rates to pay for the excess cost.
“One mile of overhead transmission lines within an urban environment can be installed in approximately five weeks,” TEP said in their November court filing, while that same “one-mile segment would require 26 weeks for underground construction.”
In an opinion piece published in the Star on Wednesday, Todd Hixon, TEP’s senior vice president and chief legal officer, opined that the city’s determination is contradictory.
“You’ll find TEP’s poles and wires along many ‘gateway’ arterials, including Broadway, Golf Links and Valencia, as these large, wide roadways are well suited to such development,” Hixon wrote. “Our challenge remains pending in Pima County Superior Court and might not be resolved before a route for this project is approved.”
And although the planned upgrade doesn’t include undergrounding, Hixon says, it would allow for the utility to remove 19 miles of “older” 49-kilovolt lines in the same area, while adding just roughly 12 miles of lines via the new system.
“So, a project that has drawn attention for adding poles and wires to midtown streets would, in fact, result in at least seven fewer miles of overhead power lines in midtown,” he said.
While residents near campus have demanded underground construction in their area, the cost associated with it “would be overwhelming,” Hixon wrote, “adding at least $67 million to the price of a project that, in total, would otherwise cost between $16 million and $24 million.”
“We must move forward with this project now to reliably serve growing energy needs in central Tucson,” Hixon said. “While some stakeholders will continue advocating for underground installation, we believe most people would conclude, as we have, that a cost-effective overhead project simply makes more sense — particularly one that results in a net reduction of power lines in central Tucson.”
To learn more about the plan and view TEP’s route options, visit tep.com/midtown-reliability-project.
Larson of the West University neighborhood invites midtown Tucson community members who want to get involved to write to the Arizona Corporation Commission (find contact info at azcc.gov/contact), their respective councilmembers or the mayor (tucne.ws/tucsonmc).
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