Stafford Road residents still hope for a hold up on a controversial power line project, a month before construction starts.
January and February were busy for Ed Wagner and Kelly Bartholomew, two members of the Save Stafford Road advocacy group, who spent their winter meeting with state and city officials alike, arguing against an infrastructure project slated to begin construction in their neighborhood this spring.
Although their participation in local government over recent months may seem extreme, the pair has been considerably busy since 2023, the year Portland General Electric (PGE) announced plans to upgrade transmission pole infrastructure around Tualatin, Wilsonville and Sherwood.
On Jan. 27, Bartholomew and Wagner, as well as five other Stafford Road residents, came before the Tualatin City Council and asked members to help halt PGE’s proposed 7.4 miles of transmission pole updates on Stafford Road.
PGE’s Tonquin Project began installing power lines on 11 miles of land around Tualatin and Wilsonville in 2024. The final leg of the project, and the epicenter of an over two-year-long legal battle with residents, will increase pole height on over 60 structures and plant five new poles on more than seven miles of Stafford Road to connect Rosemont and Wilsonville electricity substations. Many of the new and upgraded structures will stand well over 100 feet tall.
Save Stafford Road was formed by neighbors residing around the project area in 2023. Many residents objected to the poles on the basis of potential loss of property value, visual impairments and fire risk.
The group has since raised nearly $90,000 dollars for legal fees and successfully delayed the Tonquin Project with Clackamas County in 2024.
On its website, PGE estimated that construction of transmission lines would begin on April 1, 2026, but concerned residents told multiple city officials in January that construction began earlier this year.
Andrea Platt, PGE Spokesperson told Tualatin Life that the current construction on Stafford Road was in tandem with Clackamas County’s Stafford Road Improvement project, which required PGE to relocate past transmission poles.
“I wanted to reiterate that PGE is not currently installing infrastructure or performing construction along the section of Stafford Road that is outside of the scope of Clackamas County’s Stafford Road Improvement project. PGE has only installed poles where Clackamas County designated pole locations and provided permits,” Platt wrote in an email to Tualatin Life.
Wagner and Bartholomew expressed to Tualatin City councilors that while their aim was to get Tualatin, Lake Oswego and West Linn city officials to take action, they also wanted to catch PGE on conditional use technicalities by filing a review with the Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA) to possibly get the project blocked.
“PGE is accelerating the installation as fast as they can,” Wagner told Tualatin City Councilors. “I suspect that they’ll ask for forgiveness later.”
The City of Tualatin declined to comment on the project when contacted by Tualatin Life.
Platt said that the project was a necessity to relieve strain being put on local substations and that if an outage were to occur in the area, there would be “no way to reroute power.”
“These transmission lines are replacing equipment that are decades old,” Platt said. “The project is needed to do two things, one is to bring the equipment up to modern standards to enable it to serve the growing population, and the other is it’s needed to create backup pathways for power.”
Platt described PGE’s three years of back and forth with Save Stafford Road as “unfortunately contentious” and reemphasized that the Tonquin Project would benefit residents.
Over the course of the project’s long and contentious legal history, its status has undergone various shades of approval with county and state authorities. Clackamas County originally denied PGE’s application for a non-conforming use permit in March of 2025, citing an objection raised by Save Stafford Road. The Oregon Public Utility Commission swiftly granted PGE a certificate of public convenience and necessity (CPCN) on March 28 of 2025.
“Since September of 2023, we’ve been objecting to this project with the county,” Wagner told Tualatin Life. “After a number of different things that transpired, the PUC (Oregon Public Utility Commission) ultimately granted the CPCN stipulating that they could not condemn property until all of the county permits were approved.”
Because of CPCN stipulations and Save Stafford Road’s pending LUBA appeal, PGE is currently restricted in its ability to condemn property in the project’s path, but can begin construction on property where they’ve already acquired county permission.
Appeal Process
On Feb. 10 of this year, Bartholomew and her lawyer met with LUBA, where they argued for the reversal of the Tonquin Project and cited LUBA’s initial rejection of the project that was determined by potential visual impairments for residents.
PGE and Clackamas County attorneys were also present at the meeting and largely denied all of Save Stafford Road’s claims.
Save Stafford Road lawyer Greg Hathaway argued that based on prior analysis of the project’s “significant visual impact,” there is “only one conclusion” about the negative implications of the transmission poles.
PGE representative Iván Resendiz Gutierrez reasoned that ultimately, PGE’s project did not violate criteria solely because poles on Stafford Road would significantly impact visuals and aesthetics in the area, arguing that the project had to “substantially impair” the use of the area to warrant a rejection from LUBA.
“They use these two words, impact and impair,” Wagner said to Tualatin Life. “They say that the impact is pretty significant, but the impairment is not…That word impairment is what PGE and the county hung their hat on.”
Bartholomew and Wagner met with the Clackamas County Board of Commissioners the next day, Feb. 11, to ask that the board intervene with the project, Bartholomew calling them “the last stop to be able to stop this.”
“I realize that your council is advising you against doing anything else because it’s ‘in the process,’ but the process is a rolling boulder,” Bartholomew told Clackamas County Commissioners.
Clackamas County Commissioners, while acknowledging Bartholomew and Wagner’s points of contention and concern, ultimately agreed to take direction from their County Attorney on the issue.
“I share your concern about precedent-setting,” Commissioner Diana Helm said at the meeting. “What this could turn into gravely concerns me.”
Wagner continued to raise issues with the project and PGE’s transparency with the public at the meeting and even alluded to unconfirmed ideas that the poles could service unannounced data centers in the area.
“This very well could be a service that would help facilitate additional data centers and the big technology that’s out in Sherwood,” Wagner said. “PGE has been very opaque and in many cases has misled the community, the board and more importantly, the planning department.”
Platt denied links between future data centers and the “genesis of the project.”
“The need for this project was identified well before the issue of data centers had popped up in our area,” Platt told Tualatin Life. “Now, I can’t say what city plans might look like or what data center folks are doing, that’s not my purview, but I can just tell you that that was the genesis of the project: reliable power, resilient pathways.”
Bartholomew and Wagner told Tualatin Life on Feb. 17 that they will both continue their opposition campaign, with Bartholomew saying she would ask Clackamas County Commissioners for updates weekly and Wagner saying they would evaluate their next steps.
“We’ve been busting our butts for this county for almost three years,” Bartholomew said. “My view of what the commissioners are doing is the equivalent of congressional thoughts and prayers.”
“We don’t have any financing at this point, but we are trying to at least evaluate what the next step would be if LUBA rules in favor of PGE and the county,” Wagner said.
Save Stafford Road is still awaiting a final decision from LUBA, which is expected by March 19. Construction for the Rosemont-Wilson leg of the Tonquin Project is officially set to start on April 1.
