This article has been updated.

Towering Douglas firs line Jenny Bell’s property on 115th Ave S.W., trees that she says are now under threat because of a Puget Sound Energy project to improve the electrical grid on this heavily forested stretch of roadway.

Outraged by PSE’s effort to get her to sign an easement that would allow the company to remove 10 of her firs, Bell has started a petition drive calling on islanders to refuse to sign PSE easements and has labeled the company “a multinational monopoly” engaged in a “land grab.”

Signs dot her fenceline saying “No to PSE.” She recently hand-delivered letters to others on her street, urging them to decline to sign. She has also taken the issue to the Vashon-Maury Island Community Council, which voted on Feb. 15 to form a committee to look into PSE’s practices on the island.

“Every single tree matters deeply to me,” she said as she stood in front of her property on a drizzly day last week. “It’s so painful to me what is happening, and so many people have no idea.”

But others see the situation differently, saying that PSE — which has been purchasing easements for the past five years as part of a grid improvement project — is doing the right thing to try to enhance the reliability of electricity on Vashon, known for its sometimes long power outages. Dozens of people have signed easements along roads where PSE is working to update its system, receiving as much as $2,500 from the company in exchange for its right to remove trees, limb them or locate poles on their property.

“I looked at it as a way to improve our power reliability and safety,” said Nancy Sipple, a real estate agent who signed an easement in 2022. The power along her stretch of Cove Road “has always been troublesome,” she added. “The fact that we now have far fewer outages than we used to is a testament to PSE doing a good job.”

Al Habbestad, who lives on the same road as Bell and who received one of her letters, also said he was not alarmed by PSE’s request. “The lines they are putting in are significantly stronger,” he said. “It’s all good, as far as I’m concerned.”

Another islander who agreed to an easement, Jeri Jo Carstairs, said she found PSE “considerate and clear” when it first approached her and said the work that followed went well. “I thought it was a service to the community,” she said.

Bell, however, is not alone in her frustration with PSE. Joe Abramoff, who lives in the family’s third-generation home near Bell’s property on 115th Ave. S.W., also described a “pushy” attempt by PSE to get him to sign an easement that would give the company access to a large swath of his front yard and the ability to remove up to 11 trees – nearly the entire treeline in front of his home.

“It was a bad experience all the way around with them,” Abramoff said. “I told them there was no way I’d sign over 10 feet of our property for $2,000.”

Signs saying “No to PSE” now dot his yard, as well.

Trees and wires

PSE began its reliability improvement project on Vashon about five years ago, in part as a response to the state’s Utilities and Transportation Commission (UTC), which regulates investor-owned utilities such as PSE. According to Shawn Greninger, PSE’s supervisor of the real estate team that includes Vashon, the UTC identified PSE’s aging system as a leading cause for frequent outages on Vashon and told the company to address it.

“We have old poles and old copper wire — in some places it’s basically thin, uncoated wire that snaps if a tree hits it,” Greninger said.

PSE is now installing “tree wire,” aluminum-clad wire with a steel core and coating. “It’s strong and resilient from strikes from trees,” Greninger said. “The stuff that brings down copper wire won’t bring down tree wire.”

The need for the easements, though, is due to another factor that has come into play, he said. Pole replacement along county-owned roads requires a permit, which in turn means PSE has to comply with the county’s “clear zone” requirement — a regulation that didn’t exist 50 or 60 years ago, when many of PSE’s current poles were erected.

The clear zone rule — a state-issued road design that the county adopted — requires 10 feet of unblocked shoulder on either side of the road, enough room for a driver to recover if their car were to swerve off the road. PSE’s new poles cannot be erected in these clear zones.

According to Broch Bender, a spokesperson for King County’s Roads Division, that clear zone requirement has been a part of the county’s road engineering standards since at least 2007. It applies to all rural roads without curbs or sidewalks regardless of the speed limit, Bender said — essentially, nearly all of Vashon’s roads. The county doesn’t proactively create 10-foot swaths on the sides of roads, Bender added; the safety standard is triggered in the permitting process.

Greninger concurred. “Any time we touch a new pole, we’re required to meet these new standards,” he said.

In some instances, the county right-of-way is big enough for PSE to erect its new tree wire lines without being in the clear zone, Greninger said. In those areas where it’s not — or where the poles’ cross-arms extend into someone’s property — PSE seeks either an aerial or a land-based easement.

In the five years since the company began its tree wire project on Vashon, Greninger said PSE has conducted 10 jobs, each of which required six to eight easements — so as many as 80 easements on Vashon. Most people, he said, have agreed to an easement — he put the company’s easement success rate at 95 percent and its job completion rate at 100 percent.

“People recognize the need for the project because everyone wants reliable power,” he said. The move to electric vehicles has enhanced the need, he added. “There’s more demand for electricity.”

Greninger said PSE tries to work with people — the company’s arborist walks the land with property owners, identifying trees that need to come out and working around those that are particularly important to the owner, he said. When someone refuses to sign an easement, PSE tries to devise a different design that bypasses their property, he said.

Because it’s a publicly regulated utility, PSE also has the right to obtain an easement through condemnation, an adjudicated process. But the company does so rarely, Greninger said, adding that he knows of no PSE condemnations over a tree wire project on Vashon.

“We don’t take people’s property. We negotiate with people and try to find a solution,” he said.

Bell’s experience with PSE, however, has caused her to question the company’s integrity. She described a pushy real estate agent contracted by PSE who called her out of the blue in an effort to get her to sign an easement; the promise of a financial bonus if she did so within a set number of days; and easement language that would give the company free rein to cut as much as it needed and without any consultation with her.

Bell, a former Water District 19 commissioner who has lived on Vashon for 20 years, said that when she tried to get clarification from PSE, she received scant information. “I got a one-page flier with very little information and no detail about what they were actually doing — just about how marvelous tree wire is,” she said.

The company acknowledged in an internal email thread forwarded to Bell that it had failed to effectively reach out to Bell and other neighbors before having a real estate agent contact them for an easement.

“This is the second call/email I have received from customers on Vashon. Both have expressed they have not been informed about a project, yet agents are contacting them and only offering them limited information and asking them to sign an easement,” a supervisor in the real estate division wrote to others at PSE, referencing Bell’s concerns. “This is a perfect example of what goes wrong when there hasn’t been an effective project outreach to our customers.”

To Bell, the email, which was forwarded to her, suggests that PSE has made several missteps in its easement project on Vashon and as a result cannot be trusted. “My impression of PSE is that you cannot trust them with your trees or your property,” she said.

Fees and fires

Bell has also put forward another criticism of PSE in both her petition and in a page 1 commentary she wrote for The Loop: She says she now believes that PSE may be undertaking this work in an effort to get out from under a franchise fee it has to pay to King County for use of the county’s right-of-way. PSE, her petition says, “appears to be masking a strategy … in order to escape” this fee.

The franchise fee is new — the King County Council passed it into law in 2016, requiring all utilities to compensate the county for their use of public rights-of-way in unincorporated King County. Several utilities challenged the fee in a lawsuit that ultimately went to the Washington Supreme Court; PSE was not one of the plaintiffs but submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the plaintiffs. The high court ruled in King County’s favor in December 2019, and utilities have been paying the fees ever since.

PSE’s current fee for the use of the county rights-of-way is $2.5 million a year — a fee that will last until 2029, when the county and PSE will negotiate another 10-year compensation rate.

Bell said she thinks PSE may be motivated by what she called “unrealized future assets” — the amount of money it could save in its franchise fees if it were to go to the county and argue that it needed far fewer miles of public rights-of-way because of its easement work. “There’s a financial benefit to PSE to move their poles onto people’s property,” she said.

Diane Emerson, who chairs Vashon’s community council, said she also wonders if PSE’s determination to get out from under an onerous fee is behind the company’s easement practice. The realization that such a strategy could be driving PSE came to her in the middle of the night, she said, when she remembered reading about the legal dispute over the franchise fee.

And to her, it’s another reason the community council was right to create a committee to look into the utility’s practices. Bell, she added, will temporarily chair the committee until it meets and selects a permanent chair. (At the committee’s first meeting this week, Bell was selected as the permanent chair.)

“There are a lot of questions. And I don’t think we’re going to get good answers from PSE,” said Emerson, adding that she was speaking for herself and not the entire council. “I don’t think they’ll confess that they’re doing this.”

But both PSE and the county say that Bell and Emerson are wrong. Greninger said such a strategy makes no sense because of the cost of easements.

“We don’t pay franchise fees on each pole, and going onto private property is not a way to save money,” Greninger said. “It’s more expensive for us to do that. I want to dispel this myth … It’s a flat rate. If we move one pole out of the right of way, we’re not going to get a discount.”

Kerri Schaefer, who oversees the county’s utility franchise program for the county’s Facilities Management Division, also said such a strategy would not make sense because PSE would likely need to use the public rights-of-way even if it moved its poles onto private property.

“Just because they move their poles out of the right-of-way doesn’t mean their franchise has ceased to exist,” she said. PSE needs access to those rights-of-way for any number of issues that could come up, including other kinds of infrastructure work, she said.

She also thought it would be odd for the company to break up its corridors in this way. “It wouldn’t make sense to exclude a mile here or a mile there.”

The arguments over Bell’s frustrations aside, the dispute in some ways comes down to competing public values on Vashon — the desire for a more reliable grid and the safety such reliability provides versus the desire to maintain as many of Vashon’s mature trees as possible, trees that capture and store atmospheric carbon.

Rick Wallace, vice president of VashonBePrepared, said grid reliability is “terribly important. … And in my experience, the thing that causes power outages on Vashon are downed trees and limbs.”

“I haven’t studied this situation (with PSE),” he added. “But that would be my going-in position. If — and that’s an important word, if — these easements improve the reliability of power on the island, that’s a valuable thing.”

Kevin Jones, who chairs Vashon’s Climate Action Group and who signed Bell’s petition, sees it differently. A long-time critic of PSE, he said he’s more concerned about the impact of PSE’s easement practices on Vashon’s forests than he is on grid reliability.

“Some of us feel that if the power goes out, we manage that,” he said. “Let’s not cut our trees to make our lives a little bit easier.”

But Tom Dean, another islander who cares deeply about trees, said he sees another wrinkle in all of this. Dean, conservation director at the Vashon-Maury Island Land Trust, said an analysis of some of the recent wildfires in other parts of the country shows they were triggered by sparks from power lines. This is relevant to Vashon, he said, because of the number of trees up against power lines.

“A major wildfire could be caused by fireworks,” he said. “But by far, the most likely cause would be a branch on a power line, a tree on a power line or a power line downed by the wind.”

To him, that makes PSE’s installation of sturdier wire critically important. “We might lose a few trees,” he said, “but we might save the forest.”

The community council’s new PSE Advisory Committee first met on Feb. 29 from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. at the library meeting room.

Correction: Jenny Bell’s property was listed incorrectly in a previous version of this story. It is on 115th Ave S.W., not 115th Street NW. We regret the error.