The Public Utilities Commission’s rejection last week of a Lower Colorado River Authority electric route application will give landowners more time to comment about the placement of transmission lines.

The PUC denied permission for LCRA’s Transmission Services Corp. to build double-circuit, 345-kilovolt transmission lines to carry wind-generated electricity from a switching station in Gillespie County to the proposed Newton station at the west end of Kempner.

Neither LCRA’s preferred route — which would have traveled north of Lake Buchanan to reach Kempner — nor an administrative law judge’s preferred route, which would have passed by the southern part of the lake, met PUC standards, commission Chairman Barry Smitherman said in a memorandum.

Both routes, Smitherman said — adding that LCRA did not give PUC enough satisfactory options — affected a large number of habitable structures.

The effect on Lampasas County properties, in particular, led the commission to deny the utility application, Smitherman said in the memorandum. Segments C27, C28, C29 and C30 of the administrative law judge’s recommended route did not use or make plans to parallel existing transmission rights of way, the chairman said.

In addition, numerous property owners who intervened as the Landowners Preservation Group faced “the ‘Morton’s Fork’ of having the transmission line either in their front yard or their back yard,” Smitherman said.

“Bottom line, I am disappointed with the number and quality of the route alternatives in Lampasas County,” the commission chairman said.

LCRA staff may have had trouble following other rights of way, Smitherman said, because an Oncor Electric Delivery application for Brown County-to- Newton lines — which the PUC recently approved — had not obtained final approval when LCRA filed its application months ago.

“Now that Docket #37464 [related to the Oncor route] has been decided by the commission, LCRA should have a better sense of the route alternatives available in and around the city of Lampasas,” Smitherman said.

At the recent PUC hearing about LCRA’s application, commissioners asked Oncor officials in attendance to consider moving the Newton switching station to accommodate LCRA lines.

Alternative locations for the Newton station have not been discussed in detail, LCRA spokesman Robert Cullick said. LCRA officials are reviewing the direc- tions issued by PUC commissioners, he said, to plan new routes that address concerns about property effects.

Although LCRA staff have not set a date to submit a new application, Cullick urged landowners who believe transmission lines may affect them to comment about possible routes.

“If you were involved before, please stay involved,” he said. “The issue isn’t going away, so you need to stay involved all the way through the final decision.”

LCRA spent more than $4 million to research and seek input about its original 11 route proposals, Cullick said. The river authority also sent out “thousands of letters” to potentially affected landowners and will send new notifications to all those who own properties within 500 feet of possible new routes, the spokesman said.

Jack Clark, a Landowners Preservation Group member who owns property west of the Lampasas River, said he and other LPG members were disappointed with what they considered a lack of options near the Kempner end of the transmission route. LPG advocates placing electric lines along property lines as much as possible, rather than building transmission structures through the middle of tracts of land.

“When you diagonally cut a ranch, particularly a 400-acre [or smaller] ranch, you’ve ruined that ranch,” Clark said. “The highest and best use of all these ranches is development. You can’t develop any of this” with lines crossing through the middle of property, he said.

LCRA will work hard, Cullick said, to design routes that mitigate landowners’ and PUC commissioners’ concerns.

“We certainly heard the comments from the floor,” Cullick said. “Our job is to seek to understand the directions from the PUC.”

Even once LCRA picks its new preferred route, landowners who may be affected by transmission lines still have opportunities to advocate that the route be moved, Cullick said. He cited the recent rejection of both the LCRA preferred route and the administrative law judge’s suggested path as an example.

“Don’t take for granted that the LCRA recommendation will be approved by the Public Utilities Commission,” Cullick said.