Xcel Energy’s plan to cut neighborhood trees in Centennial to clear space around existing regional transmision lines may end up in court.
The utility wants to remove trees beneath lines that could be potential hazards and cause outages.
Two years ago, some Centennial residents complained about utility contractors taking down every tree in their yards as a heavy-handed policy.
Now, a group of residents in the Homestead neighborhood has hired an attorney to fight what they say is the possibility of 400 trees being taken out, calling it a case of “extreme vegetation removal tactics.”
Xcel has implied in its discussion with homeowners that the tree-cutting procedures are linked to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission policy, said Pete Gammie, an area resident.
The Colorado Public Utilities Commission did not respond to an inquiry from the homeowners.
FERC is reviewing tree-cutting policies and does not prescribe any policy that involves clear-cutting trees, allowing utilities to adopt their own “best practices,” Gammie said.
Mark Stutz, an Xcel Energy spokesman, said the lines were installed long before there were residences and that the utility has easement rights.
Residents were contacted in June 2009 to give them advance notice of the process and to allow them to move trees if they were young enough, Stutz said, “or with the understanding we would work with them to find some replacement vegetation that would be compatible with the lines.”
Gammie said an Xcel vegetation representative met with some of the homeowners but had no authority to change the company’s stance.
Xcel previously gave out guidelines for trees under the distribution lines that the company now seems to fail to follow and ignores in discussions, Gammie said.
“I understand it’s a money thing — it’s expensive to trim trees,” Gammie said. “But the problem we’re having is they’re trying to treat us, in suburban Centennial, the same way as a group of trees in the middle of a forest in Michigan. It just kind of falls under the same requirements.”
Stutz said some “objective and subjective” judgments are made on residential trees near power lines, that the neighborhood in Centennial is not being singled out and that the standards will apply to the entire power grid.
“The only thing that upsets people more than tree removal is a power outage, and by leaps and bounds, a power outage is much more upsetting to customers and to a much larger degree,” Stutz said.
Even trees that will never reach the height of the lines can have limbs break off in a windstorm that could hit the lines and cause an outage, he said.
Daniel Smith: 303-954-2671 or smithd@yourhub.com
This story has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to an editor’s error, the story incorrectly implied that new transmission lines were being installed.
