The Lafayette City Council on Monday will decide whether to spend $50,000 to hire experts to assess how many trees PG&E needs to cut down to access its own gas lines running through the city.
In 2014, PG&E started the Pipeline Pathways project, which entailed removing trees adjacent to its gas transmissions pipelines, so first responders could have easier access to potential problems and crews could have better access to pipelines for inspections.
The utility giant told the City of Lafayette they would have to cut down more than 1,200 of its trees. Which, as one could imagine, didn’t go over very well with some members of the community.
In 2015, PG&E updated its list, saying it would only need to chop down 272 trees. That was also the year they renamed their project the Community Pipelines Safety Initiative. Two years later, the city and PG&E reached a tentative agreement that the utility would pay mitigation fees for each tree removed, plant new trees, and would receive approval from the city before cutting trees down.
In 2018 – after being sued (along with the city) by a group called Save Lafayette Trees – PG&E decided it only needed to cut down 207 of Lafayette’s trees. Then the utility filed for bankruptcy, sued Lafayette over its previous tree agreement, and everything was put on hold.
PG&E still wants to cut down at least 200 trees in Lafayette, and the city finally wants to clarify the details as part of settlement discussions over that lawsuit. Both sides began meeting earlier this year, discussing an agreement by which both sides would bring in their own gas pipeline and tree experts to jointly develop criteria for a risk assessment evaluation of the trees in question.
The process “allows both parties to have a say in how the trees are evaluated and provides another opportunity to minimize the removal of trees while still ensuring the safety of the pipeline,” a staff report for Monday’s council meeting says. “If this process is successful, it could result in the resolution of the city’s ending litigation with PG&E.”
Article is unclear why these trees should be cut down. It seems like if the problem was explained clearly the problem could easily be resolved.
The article seems to explain the issue clearly.
However, the part about “Community Pipelines Safety Initiative” seems to be wrong as that phrase only gets three hits in Google. All four hits are for the same article that’s posted here on Claycord. It appears to have been written by Tony Hicks of Bay City News and was first published on SFGate, then Claycord, and then other blog/news sites.
Google for “PG&E” “Pipeline Pathways” gets better results including things such as https://www.pge.com/includes/docs/pdfs/myhome/customerservice/other/treetrimming/pipelinerightofway/StepByStepImprovngPipelineAccess.pdf
I hope that people remember that the only money PG&E has to spend is rate payer money.
When PG&E say’s it’ll pay, that means PG&E users are paying.
Just like taxes
Having access to gas lines is important, for all the reasons stated.
Agreements need to be worked out.
Just remember, that in the end,
We rate payers and tax payers pay for everything.
I don’t typically post, but man, is this so real
Reminds me of something Ron Paul said, that the real tax is spending.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mxlM5eERZqI
$50K to determine how many trees to cut down? They’re trees. Have a lumber company take them down at their expense (those are experts), to utilize the resulting lumber. Plant some new ones. Tell these groups like Save Lafayette Trees to go scratch…
If it’s 50 grand just to figure out which trees to cut down, I can only imagine how much they’ll end up spending to actually cut the trees down, and then how much more to plant the new trees and maintain them.
Is Lafayette part of the Claycord coverage area now?