A decade after Newport Heights property owners killed a plan to bury the neighborhood's overhead power lines, former Newport Beach Mayor Mike Henn is trying again — and this time the price tag has ballooned to roughly $50,000 per parcel. The renewed campaign has split the Newport Beach neighborhood into dueling camps, with one side accusing the other of doctoring photos and stripping key pages from a mailer meant to explain what residents were actually signing.
Henn is leading the charge through a group called Safer Newport Heights, on whose steering committee he sits, according to the Daily Pilot. The group sent a letter to property owners on July 18 urging support for undergrounding, and it has been circulating a petition ever since. Henn, who served on the Newport Beach City Council from 2006 to 2014 and as the city's mayor from 2010 to 2011, previously lived on the Balboa Peninsula, where he led a successful undergrounding campaign, per the same account.
To move forward, the petition needs support from 60% of the roughly 600 property owners in the assessment district before the city will fund an official engineering study and cost assessment — a threshold set by Newport Beach City Council policy. Henn said he hopes to hit that mark within a month or two and has reported making substantial progress so far, the Daily Pilot reports. Once signatures are verified, city officials will conduct the cost assessment and engineering report and distribute the findings to property owners before any formal vote.
Accusations Fly Over Petition Tactics
Not everyone in Newport Heights is on board. A rival faction calling itself the Newport Heights No Undergrounding Coalition has launched a competing website and argues the effort is more about cosmetics than safety. The coalition has also leveled sharper accusations: that Safer Newport Heights digitally altered photographs used in its campaign materials, and that advocates stapled deceptive promotional materials over the official petition document.
Opponents further allege that a mailer sent by Safer Newport Heights contained only the petition's signature page, omitting two pages meant to explain to residents exactly what they were being asked to sign. Henn discussed the allegations with city officials and said he expects his group will prevail against the claims. He added that Safer Newport Heights usually provides people with a full package that includes the petition itself, according to the Daily Pilot's reporting.
A Neighborhood That Already Said No Once
Newport Heights has been here before. In September 2016, property owners in the same assessment district rejected a similar undergrounding initiative, with 61.4% voting against it, even though a neighboring sub-district narrowly favored the plan with 50.3% approval, according to the Los Angeles Times. Because city rules required both contiguous sub-districts to pass, the entire project collapsed. At the time, resident Simone Wilson said some neighbors simply could not afford the cost.
That 2016 plan would have cost individual homeowners between $6,987 and $26,757 depending on parcel size, plus another $1,000 to $4,000 for private hookup connections — a fraction of today's roughly $50,000-per-parcel estimate. The current proposal carries a total projected cost of $30 million across the district's approximately 600 properties. The Newport Heights No Undergrounding Coalition has seized on that jump, criticizing the potential cost as a central reason to reject the plan again.
Why the Price Tag Has Doubled
Much of that cost escalation traces back to a shift in state policy. Under Decision 21-06-013, issued in June 2021, the California Public Utilities Commission discontinued new allocations of Rule 20A ratepayer work credits after December 31, 2022, ending the subsidy stream that once helped offset municipal aesthetic undergrounding projects statewide. The commission redirected that ratepayer funding toward high-fire-threat risk mitigation instead.
Southern California Edison's Rule 20 tariff guidelines reinforce that shift: Rule 20B and 20C conversions, which cover neighborhood-initiated petitions like the one in Newport Heights, must be funded primarily or entirely by local property owners rather than systemwide ratepayers. SCE only covers undergrounding costs outside of assessment districts when required under its own wildfire mitigation plan. A Southern California Edison-linked above ground initiative has stated that above-ground components are actually safer and more reliable in areas that are not at high risk for fires.
That distinction matters for Newport Heights specifically, because the neighborhood does not appear on the state's most recent map of wildfire hazard zones — a point opponents have raised to question whether the safety rationale for undergrounding applies here at all. Henn has countered that undergrounding should be weighed for safety, reliability and aesthetics together, not fire risk alone.
How the Vote and Payments Would Work
If the petition clears the 60% threshold and the city completes its engineering review, the matter would go to a formal Proposition 218 assessment district election. Under Article XIII D of the California Constitution, those elections require a weighted mail ballot majority, with votes weighted according to each parcel's financial assessment rather than a simple one-owner, one-vote count. If a weighted majority of returned ballots opposes the assessment, the city is legally barred from forming the district. The Daily Pilot reports that the final vote in this case would require only a simple majority to pass.
To ease the financial burden, Henn argues that installment plans would make the undergrounding costs more feasible for property owners, and the Newport Beach City Council is considering a separate program aimed at low- and fixed-income residents. Any bonds issued to fund the work would likely follow California's Improvement Bond Act of 1915, under which assessment costs are repaid through annual property tax liens amortized over 15 to 20 years — liens that attach to the parcel itself and transfer with any sale, according to S&P Global Ratings.
A Citywide Pattern of Undergrounding Pushes
Newport Heights is not the only part of the city grappling with these costs. Newport Beach began construction in March 2024 on Assessment District 124, a $33 million project converting overhead utilities to underground across 50 blocks of Central Balboa Island, representing the first phase of a multi-year municipal effort. Statewide, roughly a third of California's 220,590 miles of electrical distribution lines are already underground, according to the California Public Utilities Commission, leaving about 147,000 miles still overhead.
For now, the outcome in Newport Heights hinges on the petition count and on how city officials respond to the dueling accusations swirling around it. Whether Henn's group reaches the 60% threshold — and whether the city treats the alleged mailer and photo disputes as disqualifying — will determine if Newport Heights property owners get a second chance to vote on burying their power lines, a decade after they said no.
