Montgomery County officials have been angrily blaming Pepco for leaving thousands of customers without power days after violent thunderstorms pummeled the Washington region, knocking down many trees and power lines. Pepco is not without fault, to be sure. Utility executives admitted giving customers false information via a computerized telephone response system, posting misleading power outage maps online, and generally making it all but impossible for people in the dark to find out when their lights would go back on. Economics 101 tells us to expect such a reaction from a government-protected monopoly utility that doesn’t need to keep customers happy to stay in business.
But the Blame Pepco Bandwagon, as one Examiner reader dubbed it, is particularly unseemly given the fact that county officials themselves also bear some responsibility for the power outages. Even after Pepco executives repeatedly told members of the Montgomery County Council that one of the reasons for their difficulties in getting power restored countywide was the local government-protected “thick canopy of trees,” council president Nancy Floreen accused them of not coming up with “any details.” The fact is that Montgomery’s “urban forest” policy has consequences, and some of the worst of those consequences are on public display every time there’s a big thunderstorm.
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Perhaps Floreen’s power was out and she couldn’t watch the numerous TV news stories showing toppled trees that took power lines down with them, but the photos published in area newspapers should have given her a clue. Each year, Montgomery County uses tax dollars to plant 1,800 “appropriate species” trees to replace those that have been removed from the public right-of-way. Trees are beneficial for many aesthetic and quality-of-life reasons, but the county officials who are blaming Pepco for not keeping them away from power lines should at least admit their own culpability in planting so many of them near power lines. Instead of threatening Pepco with penalties for an unacceptable level of power outages for which the county is partially to blame, they should be working with the utility to make sure that future tree plantings don’t add to the problem they helped create.
Finally, power outages are among the more inconvenient signs of decaying infrastructure, but there are many more in Montgomery County that are equally troubling. The same public officials who allowed the county’s roads, schools and water pipes to deteriorate shouldn’t be pointing the finger of blame at anybody else.
