A plan to erect taller power-line towers in Ruby Hill Park that was pushed up to the City Council despite being rejected by the planning board smacks of special treatment, a Denver city councilwoman said.
Kathleen MacKenzie said the bill is a rush job that “stinks of backroom politics and shady deals.”
And she accused her colleagues of disregarding the health of Ruby Hill residents in favor of lines that will carry increased voltage.
“It is repugnant to me that some council people can say, ‘Well, let them eat chemotherapy,”‘ MacKenzie said at a committee meeting last week, making a play on the infamous line attributed to Marie Antoinette.
Charlie Brown, the bill sponsor and a regular council adversary of MacKenzie’s, called her comments “irresponsible.”
“She ought to be embarrassed,” Brown said. “For a public official to try to scare people like that is completely over the line.”
The bill is scheduled for presentation at today’s mayor-council meeting before heading to the full City Council on Monday.
While the debate has largely turned into a discussion of health and tranquility in public parks, the bill heading to the council deals with zoning.
The power lines in question were installed in the late 1940s and 1950s. In 1969, Denver passed a “view plane ordinance” for the Ruby Hill Park area to protect the panoramic views in the area. The existing power lines violated the ordinance.
Xcel Energy began working toward updating the power lines in 2003, a spokesman said, gaining approval from the state’s Public Utilities Commission to increase voltage.
The company said Denver Public Works in 2005 cleared the way for it to begin installing new towers. But earlier this year, the city attorney’s office told Xcel it would need a variance from the view plane ordinance because the five new towers would be between 5 feet and 26 feet higher.
Denver’s planning board denied the permit for the variance.
Xcel officials say they need to increase the voltage through the lines from 115,000 to 230,000 volts to service some 60,000 customers powering homes and businesses at the end.
Brown said Xcel had been planning construction for May of this year.
“Nobody wants to be in our office when the power goes off,” Brown said, referencing complaints he said he has received. “These lines are very close to capacity.”
MacKenzie told her colleagues she is not asking to halt the new lines. Instead, she want Xcel to bury the lines. “I think that is what you do when you have a line like this in the parks,” she said. “Nobody is saying don’t build the line.”
Xcel spokesman Tom Henley said burying the lines would increase the cost for that section of the project from $600,000 to $5 million.
Staff writer George Merritt can be reached at 303-954-1657 or gmerritt@denverpost.com.
