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Regular City Council Meeting Monday, January 11, 2010 Page 19 up to $3.04 per month for three years for commercial and industrial customers de- pending on their classification with Xcel Energy. Mr. Schwartz noted that Xcel Energy's Community Relations Representative Col- lette Urich was present at tonight's meeting to address questions of the City Council and/or public. City Manager Malinen advised that, from staff s perspective, one of the basic considerations in whether to underground or not was that the Rice Street bridge and interchange project would significantly change the front door to Roseville off Highway 36 extending up to County Road B-2. City Manager Malinen suggested that this was a good opportunity to dramatically improve the aesthetics of that en- tryway, while also addressing safety issues, as well as availability of power. Mr. Malinen advised that the projected cost estimates are a worst case scenario, de- pending on the interest and support, as well as cost participation by the City of Little Canada. Mr. Schwartz concurred, noting that if Little Canada participated 50/50, the cost of the Roseville surcharge would drop to less than $.50 per month per residential customer over that three-year period. Councilmember Ihlan questioned why the cost was born by residents, since there appeared to be obvious benefits to Xcel in underground lines preventing wind and lightening issues. Ms. Urich advised that Xcel Energy underwent a substantial study on costs and benefits of undergrounding for Xcel at the direction of the Public Utilities Com- mission (PUC), with the results indicating that while undergrounding provided fewer outages in a calendar year, they would be longer in duration, as the prob- lems needed to be identified underground, digging could not be initiated until no- tification of Gopher State One Call had made applicable notifications with that area marked; and then underground repair and restoration completed. Ms. Urich noted that, with overhead lines, field crews could drive a line to determine prob- lem areas and remedy outage situations more quickly. Additional discussion among staff, City Councilmembers, and Ms. Urich included average duration of outages for overhead versus underground lines; previous legal cases (City of Oakdale v. Xcel Energy) forcing undergrounding but requiring mu- nicipalities to pay those costs; benefiting parties within a geographic area versus the benefits to the entire customer base; capacity consideration by Xcel along the Rice Street corridor with upgrading required other than geographically; and pro- posal that east/west lines would remain overhead until improvements were made to those county roads.