No pain, no gain

Jackson Griffith, arts editor for the Sacramento News & Review, opened his front door one morning to a couple of young, scruffy-looking construction workers who said they wanted to get into his backyard. They said they couldn’t get to the power pole behind the Griffiths’ house any other way. He let them in and then went back inside.

A little while later, he saw through a window that the guys were rolling some heavy piece of equipment back toward his pool, and before he could figure out what they were up to, they fired up a generator, according to Griffith, and started jackhammering into the concrete next to his diving board.

Griffith’s wife, Leslie, came home minutes later and found her husband in the backyard yelling at the guys, who couldn’t produce a work order and had no on-site supervisor. The Griffiths didn’t remember receiving any warning that heavy construction would occur in their backyard, but apparently, the contractors were supposed to sink a piece of rebar into the concrete and attach it to a stretch of cable that would rise from their pool-side deck up to a secure point on the pole at a 45-degree angle. It was called an anchor, and they were told it was a necessary addition to the neighborhood.

The two young men worked for WINfirst, the company building the “most advanced fiber optics network in the world,” as one of its brochures claims. WINfirst has since offered to repair any damage, but the incident illustrates the intrusiveness that can sometimes accompany Sacramento’s high-tech transformation.

Jeff Hayes of Cablexpress, a contractor for WINfirst, says that customers regularly claim they weren’t notified, even though the city follows him around and documents every door tag he hangs. Perhaps Griffith’s door tag blew away before they saw it, he suggested.

“They’ve been back a couple of times since,” says Leslie, “but I won’t let them on the property.”

Many tech-savvy Sacramentans are looking forward to WINfirst’s arrival. The company promises high-speed Internet connections, local and long-distance telephone service, and more cable channels than AT&T Broadband, all at a slight cost savings over the competition, and all bundled into one monthly bill.

On Internet forums, tech types gossip enthusiastically about the new system. They’re curious about what a $500 million fiber optic network in Sacramento is going to look like. But looks are part of its problem.

For the increased connectivity, Sacramentans will have to get used to remote terminals the size of small refrigerators strategically placed in inconspicuous pockets of their neighborhoods. They’ll also have to get used to more cables running between power poles, and for neighborhoods that would prefer to bury all utility lines underground, the added eyesore is a serious negative. They’ll find power supply boxes, about 18 inches square, attached to a handful of the power poles in each neighborhood. These will hum quietly 24 hours a day.

“Our customers are very happy with the services,” says Carlota Gutierrez of WINfirst, “but during this construction phase, it’s very difficult.”

Arden Park, where the Griffiths live, was one of the first neighborhoods affected. Community meetings were low-key, and area residents weren’t particularly concerned about the repercussions of the build-out. But other neighborhoods are reacting.

Since last summer, the Land Park Community Association has been researching the potential impact on their property values and their quality of life. After a number of meetings between the stakeholders, they invited WINfirst, Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) and Sacramento City Councilman Jimmie Yee to talk with the community.

On January 24, in the multi-purpose room of California Middle School, the newest utility company got to meet its newest potential customers. Some residents may have harbored a quiet desire for new services, but most of them kept quiet about it. Within the group of over 200 residents, the tech-savvy WINfirst fans seemed to be in short supply.

Residents in Land Park had been hiding their power poles with big trees and other visual tricks for years. Now, they were hearing that WINfirst had made a deal with SMUD to trim trees, remove bushes and tear down fences to gain access to 100 poles in need of replacing. Their contractors would tear down the old poles and bring in new ones perhaps five feet higher. Though WINfirst saw the replacements as a benefit they brought to the community, residents were more concerned about the extra height.

WINfirst representative Winston Ashizawa promised to work closely with residents. He lived in Sacramento too, he said, and he didn’t want to have to hide his face when he walked down the street.

The company employed a customer service-oriented approach meant to quiet a rattled public, but residents didn’t trust WINfirst to hold their best interests at heart. They feared that WINfirst would be only the first new utility, but that others would follow, further burdening their power poles with new cable.

They worried that the build-out was so expensive that WINfirst could conceivably fail and leave its ugly architecture in place. And they worried about practical matters like how long their power would be out, how they could secure pets if their fences were removed, and how much warning they would have.

WINfirst and its partners tried to explain how much care went into each element of the project, but residents weren’t impressed when WINfirst said it would replace fences using new materials, and that certified arborists would oversee whatever trimming they did on trees in order to access the poles. They weren’t impressed when WINfirst said they had to add five feet to some poles to protect the safety of their workers and to meet regulated distances between two utilities on a single pole. They also weren’t impressed with the idea that they would receive just 24 hours notice whenever a contractor was going to have to do work in their yard. In fact, they were incensed.

Ron Shay of Par Electric had to back up and say that 24 hours was the absolute minimum, and either he or his foreman would personally knock on every door to explain what would happen in each yard.

There was really no way for WINfirst to please residents. Even the woman who thought WINfirst did a great job replacing her pole, and who now had a new fence to show for it, failed to convince the crowd that WINfirst was serious about customer service. What residents really wanted was to see the company string their fiber optic cables underground, along with the rest of their utility lines, but WINfirst’s license granted them the right to do what every other utility in the area did. If utilities were strung along power poles in Land Park, that’s where WINfirst would string its cable too.

Besides the potential headaches, community members were annoyed that WINfirst had planned a national build-out starting in Sacramento, and left them out of everything from the planning process to the financial benefit.

During an attack-oriented question-and-answer period, one gentleman asked, “Is SMUD getting money for this … ? Probably, yes. Is the city getting some money? Does it go in the general fund or are we going to get some back in Land Park?” For this, the man received a rousing round of applause. It was Land Park against the rest of Sacramento, even though the rest of Sacramento was in for the same treatment.

Franchise fees paid by WINfirst amount to about $8 million, said Bill Edgar of the Cable Commission. About $6 million goes back to the cities and the counties, and the other $2 million is for the commission.

WINfirst’s plan calls for a five-year construction project throughout Sacramento County, so the refrigerator-sized transformers, the humming power supply boxes and the extra cable are likely coming to your neighborhood too, along with state of the art access.

It’s doubtful whether the Griffiths can even keep WINfirst from anchoring their pole to their concrete patio. Easements are maintained on homeowners’ properties specifically so that utilities can be improved and poles propped up and replaced when necessary.

The reality is that WINfirst is “building the most advanced fiber optics network in the world … right to your door”—whether you like it or not.