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…