A group of residents who live on the northern edge of town are upset that while the lines will run underground through Millers Flat, they will be above ground on 11m high poles when they pass the front of their properties. They want Talla Burn Generation to put the lines underground for an extra 900m.
Spokesman for the residents, Peter Cubitt, said not only would the power lines spoil his view, they would lower the value of his property as they would be unsightly.
Mr Cubitt said he had spent months talking to the Central Otago District Council and Talla Burn Generation about putting the lines underground for the extra distance. He said the main sticking point was who would pay the extra cost for that work.
A meeting last Thursday between the residents and district council hearings panel chairman, Cr John Lane, failed to find a solution. However, Cr Lane said the Roxburgh Community Board was now working with the residents and the power company to come up with an answer.
He hoped to have the matter resolved by the middle of the coming week.
Mr Cubitt said he and others did not attend the resource consent hearing into the poles when it was held in March 2009, as they did not know it was on. He said they have post office boxes rather than residential mailboxes, so did not receive the community paper that the hearing was advertised in. By the time he found out about the poles, consent had been granted.
"So we never got to have our say."
Mr Cubitt said a petition he started to send to the CODC against the power lines being above ground in front of the properties had been signed by more than two-thirds of Millers Flat's 60 residents.
Cr Lane said Talla Burn Generation had a legal right to put up poles on rural road corridors and did not need resource consent to do so, as it is a permitted activity under the CODC's district plan.
"The only reasons it came to a resource consent hearing was that it was going through a residential area - Millers Flat - and it was crossing two water bodies - the Clutha and Talla Burn.
Mr Lane said he accepted some residents did not know the poles were going up, but he said others did and they failed to act in time.
"Some landowners didn't grab the opportunity to make their feelings felt. I accept that the impact of the poles may be greater than people imagined but the district plan allows for structures of up to 15m high and the poles are well within that."
Talla Burn Generation project engineer Paul Wilson said the company was working to resolve any problems with the residents just north of Millers Flat.
Mr Wilson said Talla Burn Generation had resource consent to put the poles up and it was operating within that consent.
"However, we are working with people to find a solution. At the end of the day we do live here."
Mr Wilson could not provide an accurate cost difference between putting wires above ground and putting them below.
