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.