The tale of a project to put power lines underground in the Piedmont Hills goes very, very wrong: "So this company got to work on the undergrounding, and were shocked when they started digging and discovered that the ground there is actually rock. Um, yeah. So then, this company is all 'Oh, it’s going to cost another million dollars to dig through all this rock' and the people of Piedmont Hills were all like 'Yeah, we don’t want to pay a million dollars,' and went out and raised $30,000 instead. So the City Administrator was like well we have to finish it one way or another." Now the Piedmont Township is taking one-third of its general fund to finish a botched project that only affects 140 homes. Sweet. [A Better Oakland via Eye on Blogs]