Just because they could

Scott Loftis

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I’ve owned my home just inside the Berryville city limits for a little more than five years. I’m fond of the location, which feels a little like being in the country even though I’m five minutes or less from the Berryville square.

One of the things I enjoy most about my home is sitting on the front porch drinking my morning coffee. I have a wonderful view, with Pension Mountain off to the west, a cow pasture across the highway and a beautiful willow tree in my front yard.

Sadly, that view has been diminished a bit, thanks to Carroll Electric Cooperative’s aggressive approach to “vegetation management.”

This story began a few weeks ago when I got a call one morning from a Carroll Electric representative who told me that my tree would have to be trimmed to ensure there was no danger of branches falling on the power lines that run across my front yard near the highway.

Carroll Electric had trimmed the tree back once since I bought the property, and although I thought that work was a little more extensive than necessary, I didn’t consider it to be extreme.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when I got home after work one night a couple of weeks ago to find a major limb cut off near the trunk of the willow, along with a smaller limb. Effectively, half the tree was gone.

I sent an email to Carroll Electric’s chief executive officer, expressing my belief that what was done to my willow was excessive and inquiring about the cooperative’s policies. I did not receive a direct response.

Last Monday, April 20, as I was leaving home to return to the office after lunch, a Carroll Electric crew was working behind my house, sawing branches off a large oak tree.  I pulled my car up beside one of the crew members and asked if they had been the ones who cut my willow tree.

“Yes,” he answered.

I asked if the crew had measured the distance from the power line to the tree before they cut it. He indicated they had.

“Y’all cut off half the tree,” I said.

“Yeah, after we cut off the leaders, it was looking pretty ugly,” he said.

I just laughed. Then I looked at the tree again. It’s pretty ugly now.

I left for a minute and then turned around and drove back — to find two members of the crew in my front yard with a measuring tape. Now, if they measured before they cut the tree, why did they feel the need to measure again?

One crew member approached as I sat in my car in my driveway. I asked him what the measurement showed. He replied that it was 15 feet, 6 inches and that Carroll Electric’s right of way is 15 feet.

“So, pretty close,” he said.

The crew member’s point seemed to be that six inches one way or the other would not have materially changed the outcome. And that’s true: Whether the cut had been made six inches farther out would not have meaningfully changed the appearance of the tree.

I was, however, frustrated with the crew member’s casual attitude. I also can’t help but wonder how long my lights would stay on if I decided to pay “pretty close” to the full amount of my next bill.

The crew member said he’d pass along my concerns to his supervisor, who would contact me when he returned from vacation.

Sure enough, I got a call the next day.

“You cut off half the tree,” I said to the supervisor. “One entire side of the tree.”

“Yes sir,” he told me. “Yep. That’s correct.”

The explanation I got was familiar: Safety comes first. Reliability matters. Trees grow into the lines.

All of that is true.

But then the conversation turned.

I asked the supervisor whether the tree could have been trimmed less aggressively.

“Oh, absolutely,” he said. “We could trim every tree back less excessively, but it’s at the members’ cost — and not just one member, all of them, because then we have to do it more often. We could sure do that.”

In other words, my tree didn’t have to be cut the way it was. That was just the most cost-effective way to do it, whether I like it or not.

I should acknowledge, too, that I could have paid to have the tree trimmed by someone other than Carroll Electric. I gladly would have done so had I known the extent of what Carroll Electric planned to do. But even then, Carroll Electric still could have done exactly what it did.

To be clear, Carroll Electric had every legal right to cut down anything within its right of way. I have never disputed that.

This isn’t a question of what was legal. It’s a question of what was necessary.

Those are two entirely different considerations.

Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it in the most aggressive way possible.

Particularly when it affects someone else’s property.

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Scott Loftis is editor and publisher of the Carroll County News. His email address is SLoftis@CarrollCoNews.com.