Residents press FPL on years-long undergrounding delays; council asks staff for easement list
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Summary
A long public discussion with Florida Power & Light focused on delayed undergrounding, missing easements, damaged culverts and slow responses from other utilities; residents urged the town to compile a shovel-ready parcel list for easements so FPL can put the town back on a January undergrounding schedule.
Fluent and at times heated public comment dominated the second portion of the Nov. 4 meeting as residents and an FPL representative debated delays and unresolved work on the town's undergrounding program and related infrastructure repairs.
An FPL representative described recent work: drone surveys, vegetation management and trimming on lateral lines; he said about one third of a targeted lateral had been cleared and that a goal of completion for some linings remained late November to early December, weather permitting. He also said legal easement acquisition remains a critical barrier to proceeding on certain roads.
Residents described chronic outages, frequent "flickers," damaged culverts and multiple broken poles left in place after pole transfers. "We had a tornado here; AT&T and Comcast gear still sits in the trees a year later," one resident said, calling for more forceful action to get private utilities to remove abandoned lines.
Several residents emphasized the need for an explicit list of parcels that still lack easements. "If we can get that missing-easement list to council by Nov. 18, we can plan outreach and try to be shovel-ready for the January FPL cycle," Mayor Cain said; council directed staff to obtain the list and coordinate an outreach plan with FPL.
FPL said the underground program is prioritized by performance and that parcels with legal impediments (property owners refusing easements) cannot be advanced until easements are secured. The utility said it could not simply reorder decades-old priority modeling without regulatory process and PSC oversight.
What the council directed: staff will request a parcel-level easement status list from FPL, coordinate on outreach and report back at the Nov. 18 meeting with a path for reapplying to FPL's January schedule. Residents asked the town to explore emergency repairs for damaged culverts and to escalate complaints about third-party attachments (AT&T/Comcast) to county and state regulators.
Why it matters: the undergrounding program affects reliability, safety and visual impacts across the town; unresolved easements and coordination problems with other utilities have delayed work for multiple years and remain politically salient to residents.