Piedmont Hills Undergrounding Report Moves Ahead

The City Council Audit Subcommittee approved on Thursday a preliminary report examining the handling of the Piedmont Hills undergrounding utility project. The draft includes subcommittee member and retired judge Ken Kawaichi’s new outline of recommendations for how the city can prevent another fiscal disaster.

Committee members made minor modifications before voting to send the report on to the City Council, where a decision will be made on which recommendations the city will adopt.

A more comprehensive report might follow once the litigation between the city and the engineering and design firms accused of bungling the project has been resolved. When that would happen is anyone’s guess, said City Adminstrator Geoff Grote.

“Predicting a timeframe for litigation is very difficult,” he said.

The three committee members went over the report page by page and made minor modifications as they went along. Subcommittee member and vice-mayor John Chiang is tasked with checking the accuracy of certain dates regarding the project’s progression. Another modification involves Kawaichi deleting various superfluous words such as “very” that may convey the wrong message.

Critics voiced their concerns at the meeting, accusing the subcommittee, which includes Mayor Dean Barbieri, of having a conflict of interest and concealing what really went wrong with the project.

“The work of this subcommittee is wholly inadequate and fundamentally flawed,” said architect Tim Rood, a Piedmont resident. “The staff who did the overruns should not be the ones to guide the investigation.”

Kawaichi said that the goal of the subcommittee was to provide a list of recommendations for the city to avoid a similar debacle in the future, and not to investigate who was to blame.

City Council formed the audit subcommittee to examine the handling of the ill-fated project, which broke ground in 2009 after a push by a group of Piedmont Hills residents concerned about overhanging wires.

The residents of the district had agreed to pay the $4.3 million estimated for the project, but the city was left with more than $2 million in overruns after workers encountered bedrock early on in the construction.

The three members of the subcommittee presented their , which were compiled in July.

The preliminary report will likely be presented to the City Council in October, said Grote. He said he hopes to publish the final draft, with the modifications included, by the end of next week.