Mayor Nathan Triplett Reaches Out To BWL

LANSING, MI (WLNS) - Trees and limbs are still falling in East Lansing as crews from the Lansing Board of Water and Light continue to cut them down.

That's despite a request by the mayor to stop and preserve the parts of the city they believe, make it unique.Whether the trees in the neighborhoods are two years old or two-hundred, they are coming down. However City of East Lansing Mayor, Nathan Triplett said people who live there want it to be kept to a minimum.

“We support tree trimming, the concern is that the tree trimming needs to be balanced with the fact that many of our neighborhoods have an old urban forest that is closely identified with those neighborhoods and the character and integrity of those neighborhoods,” Triplett said.

Mayor Triplett said it's a balance between protecting the power grid and urban forest in these neighborhoods.“The critical part and the reason why we're asking for a pause is, once the trimming has been finished, there's no turning back,” he said.

“Those limbs can't be undone.”Those limbs can't be undone, and neither can the result of Tuesdays meeting when there was no board support to stop the trimming.That's why Mayor Triplett reached out to the head of Board of Water and Light and asked him to stop while they work out a compromise.

However BWL said their workers won't stop chopping, and as Social Media Specialist Amy Akers said, they're happy to continue the conversation.“We're still going to follow our standard, we're still going to trim trees, but at least maybe we can have that dialogue beforehand so that people understand what's coming or that we can try and work something out so that there's a mutual agreement,” Akers said.

In the end, it's all about making a compromise, to prevent what happened as a result of last winter's storm.Trees still have to come down, so that power lines stay up to ensure safety on both sides of the aisle.