Residents urge NCIP to protect undergrounding credits, warn freezing funds could sink grant opportunities

A string of public commenters at the Neighborhood and Community Improvement Program meeting urged committee members to preserve funding for undergrounding utilities and other safety projects, arguing that removing matching funds would jeopardize large leveraged grants and the city's place in PG&E's queue.

"If we lose this money, we won't have anything to back up the $4,700,000 that's from the PG&E credits," said Susie Grimes (speaker 6), who warned that losing the NCIP contribution would set the city back on undergrounding work she described as critical to public safety and resilience. Ray Myers of Monterey Underground (speaker 14) added that PG&E had been engaged in design and that scaling the project back now could push the city to the end of the queue; "the logic of defunding $2,250,000 or short-term city budget to lose $4,700,000 makes little sense to me," he said.

Speakers also emphasized that removing locally committed matching funds could make it harder to secure external grants. "Grants are easier to obtain when there are matching funds," an attendee said during public comment, urging the committee to keep small matching allocations (for example, $65,000 set aside for Laguna Grande workout equipment) because those amounts anchor larger grant applications.

Several commenters framed NCIP as voter-directed hotel-tax money that neighborhoods voted to dedicate to local improvements rather than a discretionary city fund. One speaker called the council'requested exercise of finding $3'$4 million in approved projects "flat out wrong," saying the committee was being asked to referee a fight created by council spending decisions.

Committee members acknowledged the public concerns and debated the trade-offs between large, hard-to-refund projects (like undergrounding and San Bernabe widening) and smaller projects that could more easily be resubmitted later. Staff noted that some projects are already in design or have partner commitments and that freezing projects is not the same as permanently removing them, though staff also said no one had specified where refunding would come from if the city later restored projects.

Why it matters: Public testimony emphasized that defunding NCIP match dollars could eliminate the city's ability to leverage larger external funds and delay or end projects that residents consider essential for safety and resilience.

Attribution: Quotes and claims are from meeting public comment (Susie Grimes, Ray Myers, Ginny Babbitt, Kathy, Tim Gaddis, Debbie Majors Degnan, Janie Ferrara and others) as recorded in the meeting transcript.