The Arlington County Board has joined a chorus of regional voices asking Dominion Energy to be more judicious in tree removal efforts.
The Board unanimously voted on Tuesday in support of a resolution calling on the energy company to avoid draconian efforts to manage the landscape along Washington & Old Dominion (W&OD) Regional Park and adjoining power lines.
“I can only scratch my head” at the reasons behind clear-cutting efforts along portions of the 45-mile trail, which starts in Shirlington and runs to Purcellville, Board Chair Takis Karantonis said.
The vote came upon request of Clerk of the Circuit Court Paul Ferguson, one of Arlington’s representatives on the board of directors of NOVA Parks.
The regional-park consortium owns the W&OD Trail, and has been asking localities to lend their support in addressing the issue.
“Maybe the issue just hasn’t gotten up to the highest levels of Dominion,” Ferguson said. “We hope they will hear from elected officials like yourselves and do the right thing, but technically they don’t have to.”
They don’t have to because, last fall, Dominion terminated its participation in a 2005 memorandum setting out limits to culling trees.
In the years since the agreement was signed, “the tree growth in the area has become an unacceptable risk to the safety and reliability of the grid,” Craig Carper, a Dominion spokesman, said last fall.
At that time, the energy company had begun cutting down trees along a 4-mile stretch from Vienna to Dunn Loring. It was part of a project to replace a transmission line in the vicinity.
NOVA Parks leaders have expressed alarm at the extent of the tree clearings and the utility’s apparent reluctance to negotiate a new vegetation-management agreement — one that could include replanting affected areas with pollinator meadows.
Karantonis this week called Dominion’s actions the equivalent of “going in with a bulldozer instead of a scalpel” and termed it a “quite surprising, disturbing turn of affairs.”
Earlier the same day, members of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors also weighed in.
“What we’re asking for is a middle ground,” said that body’s chair, Jeff McKay. He termed Dominion’s planned course of action “alarming.”
McKay said that, in addition to Fairfax and Arlington, elected officials in Loudoun County and Falls Church had been approached to raise their voices.
Aisha Khan, the Northern Virginia media and community-relations manager at Dominion, said the company is currently performing a comprehensive engineering review of the trees along the route.
“Dominion Energy and NOVA Parks are still working on a long-term plan that will align with our requirements to maintain a safe and reliable electric-transmission grid,” she told ARLnow and its sister publication, FFXnow.
At a Jan. 9 meeting, Dominion offered a one-time contribution of $50,000. It represented an “insufficient” amount compared to the ecological damage caused by the clearings, which allow invasive plants to proliferate in addition to reducing the tree canopy, according to NOVA Parks executive director Paul Gilbert.
In 1977, the Virginia Electric and Power Co., or VEPCO, agreed to transfer its ownership of portions of the abandoned W&OD Railroad route to the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority for $3.6 million.
But VEPCO, which eventually was renamed Dominion Resources and later Dominion Energy, retained an easement to permit continued use and maintenance of the power lines.
Utility companies can be held liable for damage caused by wildfires caused by the electrical grid, in some cases even if there is no intentional wrongdoing.
“They have to be very protective — we understand,” County Board member Maureen Coffey said. But, she added, “this seems to be a pretty extreme deviation” from past practice.
The controversy is akin to one that played out five months ago along the Potomac River. Last fall, outcry from Arlington residents and elected officials caused the National Park Service to halt clear-cutting efforts along the George Washington Memorial Parkway.
