Tired of the tree trimming? It may be keeping your heat on.

For the last eight years, a familiar annual cycle has been constantly repeating itself in Lansing.

The sounds of chainsaws buzz through local neighborhoods while brightly vested forestry crews converge on the Capital City, hastily sawing away at outstretched tree limbs that dangle precariously above tangled meshes of electrical lines. Neighbors watch the crews with caution, protectively guarding some of the more mature trees dotting their yards and their local streets.

And without fail, the inboxes of local journalists and city officials are flooded with pictures of so-called “hack jobs,” and complaints from long-time residents who are saddened to see their trees so mangled. This year is no different for City Pulse and the Lansing Board of Water & Light. This writer has fielded at least five complaints. BWL General Manager Dick Peffley also said that at least one neighborhood complaint usually finds its way to his desk every month.

After all, the Board of Water & Light doesn’t care about aesthetics, Peffley said. Those crews are out there trimming for one reason only: to guard against future power outages. And eight years after a historic ice storm knocked out power for about 40,000 residents, including some who went without electricity for nearly two weeks, Peffley said he has learned a lesson or two.

“The bottom line is, that after that ice storm, we’ve stayed committed to doing the work that we needed to do to ensure that sort of thing never happens again,” Peffley said. “And I’ll be honest: It has been a controversial issue because the more we take down, the more complaints we get, and it doesn’t always look too great. I always say: They’re not out there to make it look good. Keep in mind that this has allowed our service area to be one of the most reliable in the state.”

About a week before Christmas 2013, a massive winter storm arrived in mid-Michigan, pounding Lansing with freezing rain and knocking down dozens of trees and power lines. It was bad enough for Shiawassee County to declare a state of emergency for unsafe travel conditions.

Local media outlets reported on exploded circuits, snapped trees and collapsed buildings. All told, more than 38,500 Greater Lansing residents reportedly lost power — a record 40% of BWL’s ratepayers at the time. Most of the damage had been repaired before Christmas Eve, but some of the more complicated fixes had kept dozens of residents in the dark for up to 11 days.

Public criticism of BWL’s handling of the ice storm triggered a political firestorm in the months that followed — particularly after BWL released a dismissive report that found it “could not anticipate the unprecedented damage.” Tensions reached a boiling point when local media outlets discovered former BWL General Manager J. Peter Lark had flown off to New York City on a family vacation over the holidays, leaving the city during one of its biggest crises to date.

About six months after the ice storm, a probe from the Michigan Public Service Commission showed that BWL had failed to follow its own vegetation management policies — which, along with staffing shortages, was found to have only contributed to the length of subsequent outages.

It was a watershed moment for the publicly owned utility company, explained Peffley, who replaced Lark after he was finally canned.

“It was obvious that we would have fewer outages — and shorter restoration times — if we had less interference from the trees,” he said. “And when you don’t trim for years, you have to be pretty aggressive. About three years ago, I used to get a complaint two or three times a week. That’s really gone down. I do understand those concerns, but we also had some pretty heavy scrutiny on us after that ice storm and it was evident that we needed to do more with trimming.”

Records obtained through the state’s Freedom of Information Act showed that BWL spent about $3.2 million on tree trimming in the three years leading up to the 2013 ice storm. And those costs climbed exponentially in the years that followed — culminating in an all-time high of about $10.2 million in annual tree trimming expenses by 2018, a nearly 1,600% increase from 2011.

All told, BWL has spent a total of $56.57 million on tree trimming operations in the last 10 years.

Peffley said 2019 was supposed to mark the end of a five-year cycle that included blanketing the city with forestry crews and trimming overhanging branches near every power line in the city. That five-year plan, however, had to be revisited midway through because BWL simply wasn’t seeing enough results. The crews, instead, needed to take a much more aggressive approach — clearing every branch and limb between the power lines and the sky above it, Peffley said.

And that’s when the neighborhood complaints really started to roll into Peffley’s office. 

More than eight years after the ice storm, however — and as a major winter storm was forecast — Peffley said he expects that every corner of BWL’s service area will finally have been trimmed to industry standards this month. Routine maintenance will still be required, but residents can expect crews to be much less noticeable.

Those annual costs have also tapered in recent years, falling to only about $6 million last year. 

Most of BWL’s tree trimming expenses are tied up in paying outside contractors for the work. Hiring three in-house crews in recent years has helped bring costs down — something Peffley also hopes to expand on as the company moves into “maintenance mode” in the coming years.

“Those trimming costs will stabilize with that work finished. They’ll go down. And once we get out of this cycle in March, I expect these complaints will go down too,” Peffley said.

The work has also paid its intended dividends. Over the last four years, average power outages have declined from about 118 minutes in 2016 to about 51 minutes in 2020 — giving BWL the title of the second most reliable utility provider in Michigan, second only to the city of Holland.

“This has really allowed our service area to move from one of the least reliable areas to one of the most reliable,” Peffley said. “This year, we’re going to beat out Holland. We’ll be the best.”

Outages related to fallen trees and limbs are also no longer BWL’s top concern, Peffley said. Last year, the biggest cause of power outages was instead related to squirrels climbing up poles and chewing through electrical insulation — another problem that BWL hopes to address soon.

“It always used to be trees. Nowadays it’s all about squirrels. It’s a nice change of pace,” Peffley added. “We’re actually looking at putting up some squirrel guards on the poles to see if it helps.”