Tired of butchered trees? Bury the power lines

The mutilation of trees in the Hollywood-Rose Hill neighborhood has again raised the issue of utility-line tree trimming. I propose that we discuss the real solution: burying the lines so that tree trimming is unnecessary.

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Don’t let tree trimmers onto your property, leader advises upset homeowners

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In 1905, the Columbia Civic League hired a landscape architecture firm to suggest ways to make Columbia a premier city. One of the recommendations was to begin burying utility lines; no action was taken. In 2014, the Columbia Tree and Appearance Commission visited more than 40 neighborhood groups, and 37 of them endorsed a utility undergrounding program with a designated annual budget; rejected again. Council has failed to act on these recommendations for more than a century.

Greenville and Hilton Head have raised their franchise fee to pay for utility burial programs. These are solid Republican cities where raising taxes is political suicide. So why have they done it? Because improving infrastructure is a smart, solid investment. Burying utilities makes a community safer. People are less likely to come into contact with wires, wind and ice no longer cause power outages, and it modernizes the appearance of a community, attracting business development and young professionals. It allows the planting of street trees, which raise property values, enhance water and air quality, cool the surroundings and reduce crime.

In Columbia the solution is easy: 1. Raise the franchise fee for the sole purpose of burying utility lines. 2. Set up a system to plan and prioritize projects. 3. Make it illegal to put a line back up once it has been buried. 4. Require major developments to bury the utilities surrounding them.

If you want this to happen, call and write the mayor and City Council members. Tell them you want to solve this problem. Or, we can just do like folks in Columbia have been doing since 1905: Pass the buck and complain about the heat, how nothing ever gets done and how the utility just butchered our trees.