Budget panel backs Transbay Cable, adopts Maxwell amendments and forwards items to full Board

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors Budget & Finance Committee on Aug. 1 voted to send three Transbay Cable items to the full Board as amended, after adopting a package of amendments by Supervisor Sophie Maxwell that reduce term lengths and add study and community-benefit requirements.

The committee considered resolutions to adopt CEQA findings and to approve two Port Commission licenses for submerged land and onshore uses to support a roughly 400-megawatt, direct-current transmission line that would run about 9.4 miles across the bay and land near 20 Third Street. Port special project manager Brad Benson summarized the negotiated construction license (up to four years) and an operation license with an initial 25-year term plus options, and described proposed annual rent and public-benefit payments to the port and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC).

"Once the operation period license starts, annual rent payments to the port [are] about $1,300,000 increasing by 2% per year," Benson said, and described an SFPUC package the staff characterized as roughly $2 million a year indexed over a 10-year period and other public-benefit elements.

Joan Lamphere, who manages the environmental review for the city of Pittsburgh (lead agency on the project'wide CEQA documents), told the…