A compromise, it appears, is finally brewing in a court battle between tree-loving citizens - that's most of us, even if we're not plaintiffs - and the Tennessee Valley Authority.
It's about time.
The subject is TVA's decision nearly a decade ago to implement an aggressive vegetation management policy that mandated a 25-foot-wide buffer zone on either side of the utility's transmission lines.
TVA's side of the story was that trees and transmission lines don't mix, and that snow, wind and other natural occurrences cause trees to topple against or drop branches on power lines and cause electricity outages. Nobody wants that.
The citizens' side was that the utility's policy changed from cutting trees that posed an imminent danger to lines to a policy that unnecessarily felled trees nowhere close to the lines and other vegetation besides. Nobody wants that, either.
The policy, which became known as the 15-foot rule, mandated the removal of trees in the right-of-way that had a potential to grow to a height of greater than 15 feet, many of which would come nowhere near the lines.
"I worked in the past for the [Electric] Power Board so I know about power easements," Ooltewah home owner Anthony Billingsley told the Times Free Press in 2013, "but I never expected them to have to remove 30- and 40-year-old, relatively small trees that weren't even under the power lines. It was outrageous."
A Times Free Press photograph that accompanied the article which contained Billingsley's comment showed the result of such vegetation management - what appeared to be a huge scar containing TVA power lines dividing verdant, green swaths of trees.
The court battle, which began in 2012, could be over within a month. TVA suspended its 15-foot rule in December 2014, and has filed to produce an Environmental Impact Statement, which it acknowledged was not done and should have been done before the vegetation management policy was implemented.
Both sides expect some sort of middle ground to be reached. The attorney for the original Knoxville-area plaintiffs believes TVA will be ordered to return to its previous policy of cutting trees that pose an imminent danger with, perhaps, "a little more bite."
A TVA spokesman said public hearings and comment periods will be held in preparation for the environmental impact statement, and the utility will "consider measures for avoiding or minimizing adverse effects wherever practical and address cumulative impacts of right-of-way activities valleywide."
It appears to be a settlement both sides could live with. We wish all governments could see things that way.