1 Unexpected costs: Bay Area cities are tallying the impact of the outages on their budgets.

As PG&E workers fanned out across the Bay Area Friday to restore electricity to the remaining customers still in the dark after this week’s planned power outage, city bean counters sprung into action to determine exactly how much the blackout hurt their municipal budgets.

From Santa Rosa to Berkeley to San Jose, the blackout forced cities and counties to beef up police and fire patrols. Wine Country tourist towns lost hotel and sales tax revenue. Cities purchased additional generators and stocked up on fuel. All unexpected costs incurred because the beleaguered utility decided to cut off power to prevent their transmission lines from sparking wildfires during what was expected to be especially windy, dry and dangerous conditions.

San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said that the power outage will cost the city “north of $500,000,” as an additional 150 city staff were mobilized, doing everything from staffing the emergency operations center to dispatching outreach workers to knock on the doors of vulnerable residents.

While $500,000 is not a significant chunk of San Jose’s $4.3 billion budget, it “represents three or four city employees who could be serving our residents doing something else,” Liccardo said.

The cost to Santa Rosa was an estimated $250,000 — a combination of staff salaries, overtime, fuel, equipment, food, supplies and “miscellaneous associated cost,” said spokeswoman Adriane Mertens.

Sonoma Mayor Amy Harrington said that the financial impact is still being calculated but that the power shutdown will have a big impact on the city’s revenue. About half of the city’s $37 million in revenue comes from tourism, with the hotel tax alone making up a quarter. Nearly all of the city’s 500 hotel rooms were dark, as all but one hotel shut down. In addition, wineries and stores closed down, costing the city sales tax.

“It will be a significant loss of income for the city,” said Harrington. “This is still our high season. People love being here for the harvest. They love to see the grapes being picked, and the weather is not too hot. It’s a great time to be here.”

October is one of Sonoma’s strongest tourism months, and city hotels charge a premium. Currently, rooms at the 27room El Dorado Hotel on Sonoma’s town square range from $450 to $550 a night, for example.

While the North Bay was hit hard from tourism loss, East Bay cities also felt some pain.

Orinda Finance Director Paul Rankin said the outages could cost the city $30,000, based on his previous forecasts. It spent money on barricades, temporary stop signs, a generator and fuel.

The final cost is still unknown since the city is calculating overtime hours, Rankin said Friday.

The uncertainty was the most difficult part of preparing for the blackouts, said Amy Worth, an Orinda City Council member.

In Lafayette, the outages cost the city tens of thousands of dollars if not more, said spokesman Jeffrey Heyman.

He explained that officials were preparing for months for outages, and the City Council granted around $30,000 in emergency funds earlier this summer. The city purchased extra generators and fuel tanks to keep city vehicles running.

On Thursday, Lafayette spent “a significant amount of overtime for public works crews to put out stop signs and cones at intersections, to set up an emergency operations center, which took time, and extra police officers on duty, to make sure everything is covered,” Heyman said.

In Moraga, the costs were lower. Cynthia Battenberg, the town manager, said Moraga had already made investments before this year in backup generators for emergency operations and the Police Department, but needed to buy three additional generators at a cost of $2,000 to keep offices running. The town also spent $4,000 on police overtime.

“It’s not built into our budget,” Battenberg said. “We’ll have to see how it all works out.”

She said she didn’t feel the need now to reflect additional costs in next year’s budget, but “if it continues, and this happens multiple times, then we’ll have to consider” it then.”

But she added that the outages were “definitely an inconvenience to the community” especially because a 40acre fire broke out the night of the shutoffs.

“That really complicated matters to be evacuating a neighborhood with no lights,” she said.

Evacuated families returned the same day, and no houses were damaged, she added.

Contra Costa County will be reviewing what occurred during the shutdown to determine costs and didn’t anticipate having a number to share for several days, said spokeswoman Susan Shiu.

Even as they figure out the cost of the planned blackout, Bay Area politicians were fuming about what they characterized as a bungled process.

Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin said that while the costs are still being calculated, “it was definitely a lot of staff time.”

“It is unfortunate that the taxpayers will ultimately foot the bill for PG&E’s ineptitude,” he added.

He also expressed gratitude to city workers who worked overtime.

Liccardo of San Jose said that he was in the emergency center when the shutoff orders came down.

“We saw shutdowns happen when wind speeds were less than 15 miles an hour,” he said. “It seemed a bit puzzling.”

While politicians expressed frustration about the way the shutdown was handled, several city officials expressed relief that there were no major fires.

“It was a huge inconvenience for our residents and for our business community, but at the end of the day it was a learning experience for all of us, and turned out as well as it could,” said Heyman, the Lafayette spokesman.