"Expensive is relative." That's how Chuck Nourrcier put it. He's the Old Las Palmas resident who has spent nearly two years shepherding his neighborhood's plan to bury its power lines, and he wasn't being glib about a bill that will run past $100,000 for some of his neighbors. He was describing a vote that works nothing like the ballot you fill out for city council or a school bond.
On October 28, the Palm Springs City Council will hold a public hearing and count ballots that decide whether Old Las Palmas spends close to $10.1 million pulling its overhead power, phone and cable lines underground. Every property owner inside the district gets a ballot. But the ballots aren't weighted one per address. They're weighted by the size of each parcel's assessment, so a homeowner facing a $150,000 bill carries more voting power than a neighbor facing $90,000. That's not a figure of speech about influence in a neighborhood that has long counted celebrities among its residents. It's how California law structures these votes, and it means the outcome will be decided disproportionately by whoever owns the largest lots on the widest streets.
What the Ballot Actually Weighs
The mechanics trace back to an August 26 vote, when the Palm Springs City Council preliminarily approved the assessment engineer's reports for two Old Las Palmas underground utility districts and set the public hearing and ballot count for October 28. Mailed ballots will state each parcel's exact dollar assessment. If ballots representing more than 50 percent of the weighted assessment value come back in favor, the council can form the district. If they don't, the project stalls, regardless of how many individual owners checked "yes."
This isn't a hypothetical concern about a handful of large estates skewing a vote. Old Las Palmas is a neighborhood of roughly 290 single-family homes sitting at the base of Mount San Jacinto, bordered by the O'Donnell Golf Club to the south and downtown Palm Springs to the east, and lot sizes here vary enough that assessments will too. The engineer's report ties each property's share to its footage along the line being buried, so corner lots and larger parcels absorb more of the total and, correspondingly, more of the vote.
Two Districts, Two Clocks
The project actually covers two separate districts, and they didn't arrive at this point on the same schedule. District 1's petition, representing more than 60 percent of its assessable property area, was certified back in October 2025. District 2 didn't reach certification until March 2026, five months later. Both engineer's reports cleared the council on the same August 26 date and both share the October 28 hearing, but the gap in how long each took to organize says something about how undergrounding campaigns actually move: not as a single neighborhood-wide push, but as parallel efforts that succeed or stall block by block depending on how quickly enough owners sign on.
The push itself started at a kickoff meeting on April 23, 2025, when roughly three dozen residents gathered to hear from consultant Jeff Cooper about what a petition drive would require. That meeting was possible because of a Palm Springs ordinance passed in November 2024, the first of its kind, which gave neighborhoods a codified way to petition for their own assessment districts instead of waiting for the city or a utility to act. Diana Shay, the city engineering project manager who drafted that ordinance, had been working with Old Las Palmas neighbors for 18 months by the time the council took it up.
The Second Bill Nobody Puts on the Ballot
Here's the part the headline assessment number doesn't cover. The $10.1 million district cost pays to bury the shared trunk lines running under the street. It does not pay to connect any individual house to that new underground system. State tariff rules require each property owner to separately hire and pay a contractor for that connection, called a cutover, once the overhead service is scheduled for removal. Southern California Edison's own estimates put that cost between $8,000 and $40,000 per property, on top of whatever the district assessment already charges.
Add it up and the real cost stack looks like this:
| Cost item | Amount | Who pays | When |
|---|---|---|---|
| District assessment (shared trunk lines) | Roughly $90,000 to $100,000 or more per parcel, weighted by lot size | Every owner inside the assessment boundary | One time, payable in cash or financed by bond over as long as 20 years |
| Private service cutover | $8,000 to $40,000 | Each homeowner individually, via their own contractor | After trunk lines are buried, before overhead service is disconnected |
| Annual administrative assessment | Up to $88 per parcel, rising each year by CPI or 3 percent, whichever is greater | Every owner in the district | Annually, for the life of the bond |
| Bond administration fee (if financed) | Up to $16 per parcel | Owners who finance rather than pay cash upfront | Annually, alongside the admin fee |
The headline number, whether it's the roughly $90,000 the Desert Sun reported or the "well over $100,000" figure that's circulated since, is the assessment line only. It is not the number a homeowner will actually write across every check tied to this project.
Why Burying a Wire Costs What It Costs
The per-mile math explains why the total lands where it does. Undergrounding can run more than $6 million per mile, according to reporting in the Los Angeles Times. Southern California Edison put its own average at $3.8 million per mile as of April 2025, compared with roughly $840,000 per mile for covered conductor, the insulated overhead wire SCE has used to harden more than 6,400 miles of line across its service area since 2019. That gap is the entire argument for why some neighborhoods choose the utility's covered-conductor hardening program instead of paying to bury lines themselves. Old Las Palmas isn't taking that cheaper path. Residents are choosing the full underground option specifically because the aesthetic and resale case, not just the fire-safety case, is what's driving the vote.
Cameron Saless, who chairs the Racquet Club Estates Neighborhood Organization, attended the original April 2025 kickoff as an observer from a neighborhood weighing its own subcommittee on the same question. Whether Racquet Club Estates or any other Palm Springs neighborhood follows the same path likely depends on how the Old Las Palmas vote and construction actually play out, since this is the first neighborhood to run the new ordinance from petition to completed project.
What Happens After the Count
If the weighted vote clears 50 percent on October 28, the council forms the assessment district and the clock starts on a genuinely multi-year build. Design work is expected to take 12 to 18 months. Construction follows for roughly another 12 months, after the district sells bonds to fund it. Owners choose at that point whether to pay their assessment in cash, avoiding a lien on the property, or finance the balance through the bond over a term of up to 20 years.
None of this touches the more than 100 overhead poles the project is meant to remove, or the wires that currently cross yards and sightlines on streets like Via Lola. Those come down only after both the trunk work and every individual cutover are complete, which means a homeowner who votes yes on October 28 is likely still living under overhead lines well into 2028.
Whatever the count says on October 28, it will mark the first time any Palm Springs neighborhood has carried this ordinance from a kitchen-table petition all the way to a funded, under-construction utility district.
If you're weighing what a project like this means for a specific address in Old Las Palmas, whether you're the one holding the ballot or you're watching the neighborhood from outside it, Richie Usher can walk you through how assessments like this typically show up in a sale, a disclosure, or a renovation timeline.
