Calling communities with power poles running down streets ugly, Jefferson Parish President Cynthia Lee-Sheng says the time has come to move beyond their use for delivering energy, cable, and other utilities.
"When you travel anywhere else, I've yet to see a community that looks worse than we do," Sheng stated Wednesday. "So we kind of inherited an ugly community—I hate to say it, I'm very proud of our communities—but we inherited ugly esthetics."
Taking her point from AT&T, who is putting their fiber communication and cable television lines underground, Lee-Sheng wants Jefferson Parish to move past using poles as the way of distributing utilities.
She wants utilities underground as a way of being more resilient to storms and other natural disasters.
Lee-Sheng singled out Bucktown's Lake Avenue as an example of way power poles have become eyesores:
"If you go down Lake Avenue, in Bucktown, and look down that narrow street and you see the poles, it's horrifying looking, if you have fresh eyes to it," Lee-Sheng says. "That's to nobody's fault, we're an old community, and we built the community with poles up. In newer sections we look cleaner."
Lee-Sheng says the benefit of undergrounding utilities is more than just the look of community:
"I myself have been an advocate, if you've heard me on any media, after the storm of hardening our infrastructure. Overall we certainly thank AT&T for their investment here. And we know we have to move toward that."
