Unfortunately a town selectman doesn’t have much sway in state politics outside of their immediate town. Haven’t heard a peep from my local state reps in months about eversource including rate hikes besides messaging that is “we can’t do anything, don’t get mad at us.” Meanwhile our legislators voted to give themselves a raise for 2023.

I think a lot of it is that they tell you to call 911 if you see lines down, but the dispatch center isn't liasoning with the utility so that they know where the issues are. The town is usually who comes out and removes the trees across the road that took the lines down and if there is no communication between the town and the utility and no customers report exactly where the breaks are to the utility it makes things take longer and frustrates everybody.

It's going to continue being pitiful until their year end announcements don't consist entirely of dividends to their shareholders and a 100% supply rate increase for everyone else.

Fuck Eversource and all privately owned utilities, and fuck anyone that voted for this embarrassment of a system.

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Holy shit they still have the same Selectman from when I was a sophomore at Ridgfield high school?

I’m 40…wow

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>Meanwhile our legislators voted to give themselves a raise for 2023.

I'm on board with asking the legislature to do something about Eversource too but the legislature hasn't had a raise in 20 years and if you want normal people to be able to hold seats instead of just independently wealthy people then you have to pay them something reasonable

25k population with probably a bigger impact on the economy (more corporations) than most of the 860. But I do agree a lot of the trees are diseased and need to come down.

That's not how it works. If the tree down involves powerlines, no local or state road worker is going to touch it.

Towns and 911 dispatch have a special line to call eversource and report downed lines. The issue is eversource prioritizing profits, and not staffing enough crews on the road ahead of the storms, and prioritizing the more affluent sections of the state.

If you asked me if I'm blowing more $$$ on legacy pension obligations for the state of CT vs Eversource dividends.....well, damned if you do damned if you dont.

Huh? Focus! We’re bitching about Eversource here.

Which is potentially a bigger issue than even Eversource. The NorthEast is losing its hardwoods at a pretty alarming rate, much to do with invasive insects. Sounds silly but there should be a lot more funding and resources put into dealing with this.

I am not an arborist by any stretch of the imagination but I’ve thought maybe things would be better if we culled a lot of the swamp maples.

On my property we have had to remove all the ash. We have several ancient sugar maples left, one oak, one ancient cherry, and one black birch. The rest are swamp maple that ‘grow as fast as they can and then decide they’d rather be shrubs and start dripping limbs’.

Norway Maples maybe? Swamp maples are native.

https://www.invasive.org/alien/pubs/midatlantic/acpl.htm

How do we get them out and Public Utility back??

“Private sector so much more efficient” they said. Fucking assholes

That must be it. I definitely think we need to manage the landscape. I figure given the absense of us the woodlands would sort themselves out. Unfortunately we are here and probably have to intervene.

I started categorizing all of the flora in my area and scarily greater than 50% is simply not native at all. From the wildflowers to shrubs and trees.

Great website btw

Gotta multitask. Too many trees to bark up and eversource is only beginning of the list.

Unfortunately there's legitimate concerns with public run utilities at mass scale.

Massachusetts has a scale store?