PEPCO Wants to Trim Your Trees

Large utility company PEPCO wants some residents in its service area to let them cut down the trees on their personal property. PEPCO says that this is necessary because the trees are posing a threat to utility lines. However, hundreds of residents want PEPCO to stay out of their yards. It's caused a huge standoff.

PEPCO says that the work needs to be done. They claim that trees falling over during storms and knocking over power lines are responsible for nine out of ten power outages. They want to be proactive and prevent the problem rather than trying to take care of outages after they occur. To that end they have trimmed trees along nearly 2000 miles of utility lines. And yet they've been stopped or delayed more than 600 times by property owners who want PEPCO to get off of their land.

In Montgomery County, Maryland alone there are nearly 300 homeowners who will not let PEPCO come on to their property to trim their trees. They say that they don't believe that the trees are necessarily posing a threat to utility lines. Moreover they are worried that PEPCO isn't going to do a good job of the work and they will be left with unsightly trees in their yards.

PEPCO seems to be getting a little bit fed up with the problem. They have asked members of the County Council in Montgomery to step in and require the residents to allow PEPCO on to the property to trim the trees. PEPCO suggests that a neutral opinion from the county arborist about the need to trim the trees might appease residents and allow the work to move forward.

The council members, however, question whether paying the arborist to do this is something that should come out of the county's budget. They note that PEPCO electric utilties is ranked in the lowest twenty five percent of providers when it comes to performance and this is true during times of good weather when fallen trees are clearly not the problem. The situation currently remains unresolved.

Source: http://www.gazette.net/article/20110720/NEWS/707209656/1022/pepco-seeks-greater-authority-to-trim-trees-on-private-property-in&template=gazette