Dear Gov. Healey:

Western Mass Towns for a Responsible Grid and the many residents signing this petition urge you to prevent Eversource from unnecessarily clearcutting 278 acres in the 11 towns of Northfield, Erving, Wendell, Montague, Leverett, Shutesbury, Pelham, Belchertown, Amherst, Granby, and Ludlow.  Please tell Eversource: No Clearcut for Profit.

Eversource's WT-11 project is the first of an extensive series of clearcuts they plan throughout Western MA, with another ~2000 acres facing the chainsaw next. State-designated categories of sensitive lands are included, as are places that generations of residents have cherished. This WT-11 project will cross through state-designated environmentally important land including 86 acres of Priority Habitat of Rare Species, 47 acres of wetlands and riverfront; and 21 vernal pools. Residents of Western Mass would be furious and heartbroken to see your administration permit Eversource’s greed to ruin these places.

Of course we want Eversource to be a responsible steward of a reliable power grid, and of course that involves some cutting. However, Eversource’s actual goal for this project is not to improve reliability – which it wouldn’t, for the reasons below – but to boost Eversource’s own profits while doing nothing for affordability:

• Eversource plans to cut thousands and thousands of trees that wouldn’t reach the wires. Cutting them wouldn’t improve reliability.
• Outages are almost never associated with large transmission lines.
  • Unlike distribution lines, transmission lines already have wide corridors, federally-mandated annual management, and redundant design for resilience.
  • Not a single tree has caused an outage, ever, on the line that makes up 28 of this project’s 29.3 miles. Two have on the other, 1.3-miles of line, but it’s unclear if those trees should have been addressed by Eversource’s mandated annual management, and also whether the outages had any impact on customers or equipment, or were handled by redundancy.
  • Large transmission lines have proven themselves decisively in real-world conditions. Even in the historic storm of October, 2011, across the entire Northeast, not a single large transmission line outage was caused by a tree outside the corridor width that Eversource already has cleared.
• Savings for Eversource don't mean savings for ratepayers. Eversource has no intention of passing along their savings, and they raised rates in 2024-2025 even when their profits doubled.

We have two straightforward asks of you.

1. Instead of overly aggressive clearcuts, require continuation of  selective cutting and pruning of "soon-to-be hazardous" trees wherever a substantial number of trees can be saved, at the very least in the environmentally sensitive areas of the project. This directive should apply in both the entire zone proposed for corridor-widening, and in the exceptional portions of the wire zone that Eversource has selectively maintained up until now.
2. Eversource claims they’ll encourage their crews and subcontractors to be discerning in the most sensitive areas, but if this is really to happen, Eversource must be told to put it in writing. If they do mean to be selective anywhere, this intent should be documented on their maps and detailed in their project narrative.

Our plea is that you step in to ensure that trees that don’t threaten the lines will be left to beautifully provide their irreplaceable benefits to habitats, the climate, our watershed, the air, and the residents of Western Mass.

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