A mighty 75-year-old sycamore. A Chinese elm that shades a bench outside the post office. A stand of oaks that shelters a lovingly maintained native plant garden. When Woodacre residents woke up one searingly hot day last week, these trees and several others were spray-painted with a mix of red dots and yellow X’s. Pacific Gas and Electric had selected some for trimming and others for removal.
Many of the 27 trees targeted for removal and the 39 targeted for trimming this month in Woodacre were in county rights-of-way along major streets. Others were within the village’s distinctive county-owned ovals, which are maintained by the Wood-acre Garden Club. But some trees were on private property, and locals were caught off guard.
“Communication is the main problem. It just started happening,” said Christin Anderson, a Woodacre Garden Club member. “So we started putting notes and crime scene tape on all the trees.”
PG&E tree work, ramped up since 2018 as part of the utility’s enhanced vegetation management program, has consistently met pushback in West Marin. Residents of the San Geronimo Valley and Nicasio, which have seen nearly all the E.V.M. work in West Marin, have complained of poor communication with homeowners and between contractors, whose work has sometimes seemed to lack coordination. Stream conservationists have asked the utility to make special allowances for trees that provide vital shade and woody debris to the Lagunitas Creek watershed.
After markings appeared on two Chinese elms that adorn the Woodacre post office parking lot and on a stand of cottonwoods that tower over the drainage behind the building, a group of locals posted signs covering the marks. “You must cease and desist from doing any tree work until and unless you obtain specific prior written permission and direction from the landowner,” they read. More signs went up on trees along Railroad Avenue. One simply read: “Hands off this tree!!”
Last Wednesday morning, Wilhelm tree workers arrived at the post office. Woodacre resident Sandy White confronted them and called the owner of the property. Roy Nee, who leases the land to the postal service, had received notice of the tree work and granted permission, though he didn’t know which trees were set to come down. When Ms. White told him that community members were upset, he met with the tree workers and learned they planned to remove the Chinese elm. The workers agreed not to cut that tree, and Mr. Nee okayed the removal of a dying pine.
“It wasn’t clear to me what their protocol was,” Mr. Nee said.
A dot means a tree is marked for trimming and an X means it’s set for removal, according to PG&E. Routine maintenance teams use red spray paint and E.V.M. teams use yellow. In response to locals who said they saw trees with red dots removed outright, PG&E spokeswoman Deanna Contreras said those trees may have been marked by both teams, or that routine tree trimming could have uncovered damage that made it necessary to fell a tree.
Supervisor Dennis Rodoni said the problem boils down to bad communication and a lack of clarity around land ownership. In Woodacre, some of the marked trees were on land deeded by the county to the San Geronimo Valley Planning Group, and in other instances, the utility had confused private land for county rights-of-way. The decades-old sycamore that was cut last week was on planning group land, he said.
The supervisor said his office has been pushing PG&E to advise residents of tree removals further in advance, so they’re not alerted to plans by dots and X’s. For its Woodacre work, the utility sent a list of affected trees to his office and the planning group about a week before cutting, but most residents don’t get so much warning. Supervisor Rodoni suggested PG&E put tags with its complaint hotline on each marked tree. “We’re trying to encourage PG&E to have better education, better outreach,” he said. “We’re getting a little bit more out of them.”
Ms. Contreras stressed the pressure that PG&E is under, saying E.V.M. is its way of complying with state orders to maintain clearances and deal with hazardous trees. “PG&E’s wildfire safety work is not optional or voluntary,” she said.
The company’s easements and franchise agreements give it the right to do the necessary work to ensure trees and limbs don’t touch its wires. PG&E inspectors use the company’s tree assessment tool, an app developed by certified arborists, to assess the health of trees and their risk to power lines. But Ms. Contreras said PG&E will meet with homeowners, discuss concerns and potentially change plans for individual trees. “We understand trees are very personal to each landowner, and so PG&E’s conversations about vegetation work to be done will be with the property owners of the specific parcel,” she said.
Yet the post office example shows that even when PG&E has the permission of the landowner, locals who appreciate large shade trees may get involved.
Woodacre residents are up against a vast utility company with a mandate to make up for past neglect. After being found liable for the tragic Camp Fire and other catastrophic wildfires sparked by aging power lines in recent years, PG&E has been in the hot seat, bankrupted by fines and compelled by the California Public Utilities Commission to maintain its 124,000 miles of overhead lines more aggressively.
The company’s E.V.M. program, initiated in 2018, compensates by overshooting state guidelines. In the past five years, the utility has completed 7,000 miles of E.V.M. work, and expects to complete another 1,800 this year. Not only does the trimming exceed the four feet of clearance around lines in high fire-threat areas as required by the state, it also targets all trees the company deems unhealthy and close enough to touch a power line if they fall.
“PG&E has killed a lot of people. They are to blame for many structures that have burned up. They don’t want to be blamed for it again,” said Jeanne Wetzel Chinn, the chair of the Sierra Club Redwood Chapter’s forest committee. To complicate matters, she said, “they have a habit of just doing whatever they want, and randomly making decisions.”
Ms. Chinn co-authored a white paper for the Sierra Club laying out the organization’s opposition to enhanced vegetation management and a set of technology upgrades it considers more sustainable and failsafe. Some PG&E contractors are paid by the tree, and others don’t get paid for maintaining certain lengths of power lines if they don’t trim or cut anything. A better solution, she said, would be to install computerized circuit breakers and triple-insulated conductors on every line.
“They can cut a million trees a year, but there’s always that one tree they didn’t cut down,” Ms. Chinn said. “If they would comprehensively update their infrastructure, we would be in a much safer position.”
In Marin, landowners who object to the removal of a tree can call PG&E’s tree safety line, and appeal to an independent adjudicator, though some have been told they must accept liability for any future power line damage. Senate Bill 396, which would have expanded the utility’s right to cut down most trees without an independent appeal process, effectively died last month.
The utility is not legally required to have landowner permission for work around its lines but is willing to engage obtaining with landowners to hear their concerns. Outside the utility’s right-of-way—a loosely defined zone under and around the power lines—rules get murkier. “It’s all untested law, and PG&E is pushing the boundaries of law everywhere,” Ms. Chinn said.
Last Wednesday morning, as Ms. White and Mr. Nee were talking to the tree workers at the post office, PG&E sent out a press release on its enhanced vegetation management in Marin, which it said would take place along 31.4 miles of overhead lines in Woodacre, Nicasio, Fairfax and Mill Valley by the end of the year.
“PG&E is committed to partnering with customers and communities and sharing information about this important safety work early and often,” the release read, citing phone calls, postcards, door knocks and door hangers as elements of its outreach. “PG&E also will work individually with any customers as needed to review necessary safety work on their property.”
The company’s E.V.M. work has been focused on Woodacre and over the hill, but PG&E’s wildfire mitigation strategy has several other components, and other projects have generated controversy in West Marin. On Camino Margarita in Nicasio this summer, some homeowners were taken by surprise by plans to remove dozens of trees and disputed the need to remove them as PG&E was simultaneously working to underground power lines on the road. The work is now at a standstill.
The valley, which was labeled an extreme wildfire risk zone by the Califoria Public Utilities Commission, has entered the most dangerous season of the year. September has brought bone-dry conditions, anomalous heat and several gusty days, along with fire anxiety. In the past 10 days, small wildfires burned in Bolinas and Chileno Valley, and falling trees knocked out power in Inverness and Inverness Park.
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that PG&E is not required to obtain landowner permission for enhanced vegetation management work because that work is state-mandated. The utility simply does not need permission to perform maintenance in its right-of-way.