Undergrounding Tallahassee's Power Lines

Tallahassee buries lines mainly in new development and in conversions that customers help pay for, not through a citywide program, per the city utility's May 13, 2025 presentation to the Florida Public Service Commission.

That presentation sizes the system: a 221 square mile regulated service territory that includes portions of unincorporated Leon County, more than 124,000 customers, 219 miles of high voltage transmission, 3,600 miles of primary and secondary distribution, more than 28,000 transformers and more than 64,000 poles. The electric utility began commercial operation in 1902. The city's slides do not split the distribution mileage into overhead and underground miles, so this page does not give a split.

Because Tallahassee runs its own system, the decision about what gets buried rests with the City of Tallahassee and its City Commission rather than with a state-regulated company. The city's storm plan pairs that undergrounding policy with tree trimming and pole inspections on the overhead system.

Hurricane Hermine showed how exposed the overhead system is: the National Hurricane Center report says about 65% of electric customers, 75,000 in all, lost power in the City of Tallahassee, plus 20,000 customers in the rest of Leon County.

The Category 1 storm made landfall just east of St. Marks on September 2, 2016, and the NHC called the damage to the city's electrical system the most significant since Hurricane Kate in 1985. Leon County's Hurricane Hermine after-action report records that by Wednesday, September 7, power was restored to approximately 90% of City customers, that nearly all City customers were back by Friday, September 9, and that the remaining outages were generally damage to customers' own service lines from the meter to the pole. A total of 198 mutual aid line crews and staff from nine utilities helped, and the City more than tripled its field workforce.

Residents raised the undergrounding question directly. The same Leon County report lists hazard mitigation related to electrical infrastructure, such as tree maintenance and underground electric, as a principal theme of the community listening sessions, and it recommends that the county and city jointly study hazard mitigation related to electrical infrastructure and tree maintenance. The city's 2025 PSC presentation lists the next busy season, 2024, as the May 10 tornadoes, Hurricane Debby and Hurricane Helene, with zero accidents and mutual aid received.

The City of Tallahassee requires underground lines for all new subdivisions and development and shares the cost of converting existing overhead lines, according to the 2025 PSC presentation.

Under these rules the city's share is largest for branch conversions, while most of a feeder conversion is the requester's cost. In each case the customer side of the work, changing where the service enters a home or business, is paid by the customer. Neighborhoods in Leon County that want buried lines therefore depend on owners, developers or associations willing to pay their share and grant easements.

Homeowners are responsible for electrical equipment attached to the house, such as the meter box and weather head, while the City of Tallahassee Utilities is responsible for the wire to the pole, the service line and the meter, according to the city's power restoration page.

The distinction matters after a storm. The Tallahassee page says the city is not authorized to repair privately owned equipment; an electrician repairs the weather head, the mast above the meter and the meter box, and after those repairs are completed and inspected the city crew returns to reconnect the service wire and reinstall the meter if it was removed. For underground service lines, the city notes, the responsibilities are a little different, and its diagrams show the split.

The City of Tallahassee's main alternative to burying lines is hardening and automating the overhead system, through tree trimming, pole inspections, automated TripSavers devices and a federal grid grant for Griffin Heights.

On January 8, 2025, the City of Tallahassee announced the $28.6 million Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, part of a $10.5 billion program the DOE Office of Electricity administers. The money funds hardening poles and other aerial equipment, automated smart distribution equipment that addresses faults and brief outages without dispatching crews, and the city's first utility-scale battery energy storage system, to be installed at the Birmingham Street Substation (BP-2) in Griffin Heights, with estimated annual system fuel cost savings of $160,000. The project engages the RIDER Center at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering and will issue 30 Clean Energy Trades certificates to trainees. The announcement does not list undergrounding among the funded work.

Florida's storm protection plan law applies to public utilities, and the statute's definition of public utility excludes a municipality, so Tallahassee's city-owned system is not covered by it.

The Legislature's findings in section 366.96, Florida Statutes, state that a majority of power outages during extreme weather in Florida are caused by vegetation blown by the wind, and they promote overhead hardening, the undergrounding of certain distribution lines and vegetation management through plans whose costs utilities recover from customers. Section 366.02 says the term public utility does not include a cooperative organized under the Rural Electric Cooperative Law or a municipality or any agency thereof. Municipal utilities such as Tallahassee instead file storm hardening reports under PSC Rule 25-6.0343, Municipal Electric Utility and Rural Electric Cooperative Reporting Requirements.

That leaves Tallahassee's undergrounding pace to the City Commission and the city budget. As listed on the City of Tallahassee website on October 18, 2026, the commission is Mayor John E. Dailey with Commissioners Jeremy Matlow, Jacqueline "Jack" Porter, Curtis Richardson and Dianne Williams-Cox, and the City Manager is Karen Jumonville.

Florida law requires an excavator to notify the one-call system not less than 2 full business days before digging that is not beneath state waters, under section 556.105, Florida Statutes, and that applies to digging near Tallahassee's buried lines.

The statute also gives the member utility 2 full business days after notification to mark the horizontal route of its underground facility to within 24 inches of either side, using stakes, paint, flags or other suitable means. Digging beneath state waters requires 10 full business days of notice. As more of the Tallahassee and Leon County system is built underground in new subdivisions, those marks are what keep a shovel off a buried line.

Last verified: October 18, 2026. Rechecked for this page: the City's 2025 PSC hurricane workshop slides, its power restoration page and Griffin Heights grant release, the DOE GRIP page, the NHC Hermine report, the Leon County Hermine after-action report, PSC Rule 25-6.0343 and Florida Statutes 366.02, 366.96 and 556.105.