BGE and Your Trees

It was the perfect day today - low humidity, soft sun, warm enough to soothe your muscles but cool enough to keep you outside. The birds seemed particularly cheery, or at least chirpy, today. I even managed to do a little weeding, though in my haste I interrupted two ladybugs in the midst of their intimacy. They scrambled (well, she did, he meanwhile hitchhiked, grasping her carapace for dear life) to the underside of a blade of grass to continue their tryst in greater discretion.

A wee bit later, the doorbell rang and a friendly BGE tree guy stood there, innocently enough.

"Hi. I am ... Do you have a moment to step outside and walk your yard with me. I'd like to talk to you about the trees I want to take out."

So here was this perfect day, suddenly becoming very dark. I know what these gentle BGE guys are about, and know they must be trained in the best tactics of anger-deflection and confrontation-avoidance. 

So I was somewhat prepared to go with him where I didn't want to go. Indeed, I was with him for about the first 25 words of his "Hi" speech, steeled against the reality of radical trimming that needed to be done to assuage the Maryland Public Services Commission and the public against BGE's horrific response to our too frequent and too long outages.

It is the trees' fault, we are told. Too many are too weak and too close to the wires. The solution to sketchy service: trim 'em back. Only, what my friendly neighborhood BGE tree guy was telling me (Baltimore Orchard Project me; tree planting me) was that trimming would not suffice in my case. He needed to take the trees down! Splice, dice and chew them up.

When I got over feeling like I had been punched in the stomach, I slipped on my shoes and strode the front perimeter of my yard with him.  Nine white pines and one locust needed to go, he said. Not stable. Most of the pines are over 100 feet high and top heavy (from years of BGE trimming).

Now, let's assume for a moment that I did not buy my house in part because I loved the trees; or that cutting four trees down wouldn't leave a broad, bare swath at the base of my driveway just a stone's toss away from the stream that runs on the other side of my neighbor's yard with nothing holding the soil in place. Let's even assume that most of these pines are on their last legs and would be coming down on their own willy-nilly at some inopportune time in some inconvenient way.

I had two questions for my friendly BGE guy:

1) Will they be replacing the trees?
2) And where? My property or elsewhere?

A bit of background before I offer up the answer. Baltimore County - like every other county in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed area - is under EPA mandate to come up with ways to reduce pollution (from sediment, nitrogen and phosphorous) in stormwater runoff. One major way of achieving this reduction is increasing the number and robustness of our trees.

So, on the one hand, we are going to be spending millions of dollars in our county over the next five plus years wrestling this water pollution dragon to the ground, in part hoping to utilize the presence and planting of trees to capture, hold and filter the water.

Now, along comes BGE, with the support and indeed the mandate of the state's PSC, in the midst of a rampage of not only pruning but taking down (taking out, in the words of my visitor) whole, mature trees with root systems that run deep and sure.

So, I asked, are you replacing the trees? And the answer, incredibly enough, was, "No."

"How many trees are you taking down county wide?" I ask.

"Don't know," was the answer.

"Is there somewhere on the web I can read more about this project?" (Perhaps a fuller picture would emerge through the communications office. After all, this guy is an arborist, not a policy-maker.)

"Sure, the program is called CBCERT. You can look it up."

So, I did. 'Taint there. If it is, I haven't been able to find it. There is some mention of the PSC, but the scope and reach and impact of this tree removal program is not there.

Has anyone done an environmental impact analysis of this grand scale tree removal, I am wondering. You would think that would be important.

But just as BGE didn't come around to sink their wires into the ground when FIOS came around to bury theirs ("Why not," I asked? "If the reason we have to cut the trees is because our electric wires are above ground and if they are above ground because of the expense in burying them - which is what I was told, then why, when someone else is coming around to bury thousands of miles of wires in the ground, why don't you piggy back on that?" Answer: the world just doesn't work that way.), so the PSC and, evidently our own  Dept of Environmental Protection and Sustainability have either not taken this on or have not been successful in winning a commitment of funds or action that would guarantee the replacement of every tree that is being removed.

If you are still reading this, you are indeed a dear friend.

So here is what we have to do:

1) If the BGE guys come around to chop down your trees, ask them for a voucher to help you go out and buy a replacement tree. Then go out and buy one! Only this time make sure it is a wire-friendly variety (ie, low enough to live under the wires, even if it needs to be constantly trimmed) or don't plant it near the wires.

2) Contact Vince Gardina, Director of the Dept of Environmental Protection and Sustainability, and your council members to talk to them about what efforts are being made to assure that every single tree that is taken down will be replaced somewhere appropriate in the county.  We cannot afford to lose so many trees for all sorts of reasons, not least being our stormwater management mandate.

Let me know how it goes!