RAMONA -- Residents from Ramona and other backcountry communities told state and federal officials Tuesday that they should examine whether the Sunrise Powerlink transmission line would spark wildfires and make them harder to put out, in an environmental study of the $1.3 billion project.

"We live with fires, but we don't want another source of ignition," said Diane Conklin, a Ramona activist who represents Communities United for Sensible Power, a coalition of community groups spread from Carmel Valley to Ranchita. The groups oppose San Diego Gas & Electric Co.'s proposed 150-mile power line.

Conklin made the comment in a scoping meeting Tuesday at the Charles Nunn Performing Arts Center at Ramona's Olive Peirce Middle School. About 30 people attended.

The meeting was designed to gather suggestions on issues to be addressed in the environmental study that the California Public Utilities Commission and U.S. Bureau of Land Management will undertake jointly. Meetings are being held throughout the week in San Diego and Imperial counties.

"This is the first step in the process," said Tom Zale, a multiple resource staff supervisor for the Bureau of Land Management in El Centro, after the meeting.

Environmental studies determine whether a project will harm the environment and communities, and whether those threats can be neutralized.

Zale said the study will guide his agency's eventual decision to approve or deny permission for SDG&E to cross 33 miles of federal land in Imperial and San Diego counties. The study also will guide the utilities commission's decision whether to grant permission to build the line.

Those decisions are expected to come by late next year. SDG&E plans to start construction in 2008 and begin moving electricity toward the coast in the summer of 2010.

The preferred route for the line would meander north and west from El Centro, crossing Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, Ramona and Rancho Penasquitos en route to an existing electrical substation in Carmel Valley. On Monday, SDG&E unveiled three alternate routes that would avoid the state park. Each would follow the Interstate 8 corridor through southeastern San Diego County from El Centro before veering north through the Descanso and Julian areas to Lake Henshaw, site of a proposed major substation.

Fat 500-kilovolt wires would be strung from metal towers as tall as 160 feet. The wires would deliver 1,000 megawatts to 1.3 million homes and businesses in San Diego County and southern Orange County, increasing the region's power supply by more than 20 percent.

SDG&E maintains the region needs the extra power to shore up an anticipated shortfall early next decade. The utility also maintains the line offers the best opportunity to bring in electricity from nonfossil-fuel sources, such as solar and geothermal plants that tap the power of the sun and geysers, and to comply with a new state law that mandates using such sources for 20 percent of supplies by 2010.

Environmentalists and residents of communities that would be crossed by the wires oppose the plan. They argue that there are cheaper and less destructive ways to fill the projected supply gap and comply with the law, such as building power plants in metro San Diego and encouraging homeowners to put solar panels on their roofs.

On Tuesday, Conklin stressed that state and federal agencies need to study those other options, to determine whether the line is really needed. As well, she said, agencies should examine whether the proposed solar power plant in Imperial Valley that SDG&E is counting on to fill much of that 1,000-megawatt capacity is likely to be built.

The Stirling Energy Systems plant relies on a technology that is being used in a national laboratory in New Mexico on a small scale, but has not been used commercially. And the Phoenix company has yet to obtain state permits to build the plant.

"I believe they (SDG&E officials) are putting the cart before the horse," said Jim Davis, who operates a 550-acre cattle ranch in the Mesa Grande area.

Conklin also urged state and federal officials to evaluate whether the wires would threaten to spark another devastating wildfire such as the ones that burned through the area this month in 2003. One of those was the largest in California history -- the 270,000-acre Cedar fire.

"It burned to a crisp many of the open spaces that SDG&E would like to run its line through," she said.

Denis Trafecanty, a Santa Ysabel man who owns a health care distribution business in Poway, suggested that the line would make it difficult for firefighters to reach blazes on the ground and fight them from the air.

Eric Larson, executive director for the San Diego County Farm Bureau, called on the agencies to analyze impacts on the region's backcountry farms.

To minimize impacts on some communities, SDG&E has proposed burying seven miles of the line, in the San Diego Country Estates area of Ramona and through Rancho Penasquitos. Sharon Lynch, who lives in 400-acre Holly Oaks Ranch northeast of the estates, asked that the line be buried in her neighborhood, too.

"We think that our community of 100 families is just as important as Rancho Penasquitos and San Diego Country Estates," Lynch said.

- Contact staff writer Dave Downey at (760) 740-5442 or ddowney@nctimes.com.