November 2, 2022
Mayor and City Council
City of Fresno
2600 Fresno St
Fresno, CA 93721
Dear Mr Mayor and City Council,
United Health Centers of the San Joaquin Valley (UHC) is a federally qualified health center with facilities located in Fresno, Tulare and Kings counties. We are a safety net clinic system that serves everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. Our facilities garner a lot of community and municipal support due to the patients we serve, but we still struggle to create efficiencies and reduce overall costs for our developments due to extended engineering and response times from PG&E.
Over the past 10 years, we’ve grown nearly 20 sites and have had many interactions with PG&E. As a commercial development client, we haven’t seen the same year long delays that many of the residential developments are experiencing, but we feel that reforming the current process would yield substantial benefits for everyone that work with PG&E. PG&E has the opportunity to be a partner and with more availability and interaction up front, we can avoid costly mistakes that delay access to area residents that so desperately need our services. In normal times it’s a serious issue, but in pandemic times, it can be a matter of life and death.
PG&E is as pivotal to a development as the local building department and fire department, but similar to Cal-Trans and other quasi-government agencies, the bureaucracy of the process creates un-needed delays that ultimately lead to higher costs. Here are a few projects that we recently completed where we had issues with PG&E:
• Huron Health Center – This project opening was delayed nearly 6 months due to transforme r
issues and meter set delays. We were required to rent a generator capable of powering the entire building so that we could acclimate flooring and test all systems because we couldn’t get power to our site. This caused considerable additional cost by way of rental fees and general contractor extended overhead, but more importantly delayed services to a city that had no
other options.
• Dinuba Health Center – During the due diligence process, we connected with PG&E to confirm that existing transformer adjacent to our site was sized appropriately and had available power to service our new 17000sf clinic. After we closed escrow and submitted our engineering drawings for review, we found that PG&E authorized the adjacent previous development to use 100% of the transformer’s capacity and we were forced to trench over 1000 linear feet, under a state highway, to pull power to our site. We were also conditioned to bring additional condui ts
for other developments with no financial consideration. The cost implication was over $300,000.
• Minnewawa Health Center – We had a few issues with this site, one of which we are still dealing with. For the first issue, we had our service established in a good timeframe, however there was no communication with other utility agencies that resulted in considerable delays removing the existing poles in the right-of-way. For the second issue, PG&E provided the wrong solar service application and then proceeded to not review the most current set of plans. As a result, we DocuSign Envelope ID: 11B49B4C-DFE3-4838-879D-299284A0B32C have had a health center open for almost a year and our $500,000 solar system is still non- operational.
As President and CEO, my only objective is to maintain and expand care for UHC’s patients. Higher facility costs combined with extended PG&E approval timelines makes building more facilities less feasible. The valley needs more facilities. PG&E has failed to implement “best practices” and make the development process more streamline resulting in a need for change. UHC is in support of the city of Fresno hiring a consultant to identify other options if PG&E is unwilling or unable to provide the basic services required of them. We need results in order to make a meaningful difference.
Sincerely,
Justin Preas
United Health Centers
President & CEO
(559) 646-7003
[email protected]
DocuSign Envelope ID: 11B49B4C-DFE3-4838-879D-299284A0B32C