![]() ![]() ![]() Local Renton businesses testified at the hearing in favor of Energize Eastside, most stating the importance of consistent power for a fast growing Renton and that power is essential for emergency operations. The city also received over 72 written comments about the proposal, and more continued to come in via email during the hearing. City staff, CENSE, PSE, local businesses, hospitals and Renton residents spoke at the meeting. 8, Olbrechts listened to close to five hours of testimony for and against the project. CENSE then brought Bellevue council’s decision to King County Superior Court in late December. The city of Bellevue agreed with the hearing examiners decision, as reported by Blake Peterson in Bellevue Reporter. The Energize Eastside project went through four days of debate in front of the Bellevue hearing examiner in spring 2019, and then faced Bellevue City Council in fall 2019, when CENSE and other groups appealed the hearing examiner’s approval. To mitigate, staff recommend poles be treated with art wraps. Staff at the meeting said they were most concerned with tree removal and visual impacts of the polls in Renton. The city then resumed the application, a year and a half later, in November 2019, with eight conditions of approval. Right now PSE has only applied for the portions of the project in south Bellevue, Newcastle and Renton. The project also adds a new substation in south Bellevue to add more power capacity. The project uses the four miles of line in Renton, with pole heights between 70 feet to 100 feet. The poles will be taller than the current line, and will require removal of trees, which PSE has stated it intends to replace over 1:1. ![]() The project increases energy for Eastside cities via removing 144 wooden poles with 115 kilohertz (kHz) lines, to 41 steel poles with 230 kHz lines in the Renton portion. “I never thought power lines could be so interesting to me, but they were, and it raises some really important issues,” Olbrechts said at the end of a five-hour public hearing on the project on Jan. The Energize Eastside debate is in Renton, as city Hearing Examiner Phil Olbrechts has 20 days to look over thousands of pages of documents from the applicant,Puget Sound Energy (PSE) and opponents, including group Coalition of Eastside Neighborhoods for Sustainable Energy (CENSE). ![]()
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