Residents of Ann Arbor are furious with a local utility company for trimming back trees that have grown near power lines to prevent outages.
The Michigan college town is known for its healthy tree canopy, eventually earning it the nickname Tree Town.
So when Anita and Ron Delph saw a contractor for DTE Energy had massively cut back the beech that had long stood outside their home, they were outraged.
'Who would want to buy a house when they had to look at that out their front door?' Ron Delph told The Wall Street Journal, while Anita called what happened to the tree a 'massacre'.
After the Delphs called DTE to complain, a company representative came out. All involved concluded that the mess of branches with no leaves left looked terrible, and the entire tree was removed.
DTE, which provides electricity to millions of customers throughout Michigan, has said that overgrown trees have contributed to countless outages throughout the Detroit metro area.
So in 2019, it undertook a herculean effort to trim trees near power lines. Over the next five years, it spent $1 billion on this endeavor.
And last year, Ann Arbor had the most reliable electricity service in 30 years, according to the company.
Pictured: The trimmed back tree outside Ron and Anita Delph's home in Ann Arbor, Michigan
Ann Arbor, also known as Tree Town, got the nickname for a reason. It has an incredibly healthy tree canopy that has been maintained by the city for decades
Still, this rationale is not enough to calm the anger of residents who say their trees are being destroyed.
The city seal is a tree and canopied streets are seen as an essential aspect of the community, making it a particularly thorny issue.
'When they start seeing what appears to be an indiscriminate sort of cutting of the trees after decades of disinvestment or underinvestment by DTE, it leads—rightfully so—to a lot of frustration and anger,' City Councilwoman Erica Briggs said.
DTE claimed that it has only received an average of 17 complaints per year from Ann Arbor residents about trimmed trees in the last five years.
Briggs did concede that electricity service has been better as of late, but still argued that DTE should do better when trimming.
Residents are of two minds about it, with some saying that DTE is ruining the character of the neighborhood, while others acknowledge the need to shrink the profile of certain trees to stop outages.
Ron Delph understands that DTE needs to trim trees but wishes they would consider homeowners' desire to maintain the canopy.
'It doesn’t have to be: OK, you can’t touch the tree, or, we’re going to whack the tree back so much that you can’t stand to look at it,' he said.
'I think there’s a happy medium, and they ought to strive for that.'