Lorne Abugov
Editor

As hockey fans of the Ottawa Senators know all too well, the ugliest word that can come out of a General Manager’s mouth is “rebuild.” A “rebuild” is hockey’s code for ripping the guts out of your beloved home team, eliminating your favourite veterans and replacing them with washed-up bush leaguers, “future considerations” and a pile of draft picks.

On Thursday, November 7th, the residents of Centennial Boulevard learned from Hydro One that they’ve just become the unwilling centrepiece of Ottawa’s latest rebuild. And, as the Hydro One spokesperson repeatedly reminded them that day, they don’t call it a “rebuild” in the electricity business, they call it a “re-beautification.”

By the time you read this, nine (9) healthy, adult and much-loved trees that occupied both the centre of Centennial Boulevard and the hearts and souls of the street’s residents will have been chopped down by Hydro One. More than 50 years of peaceful coexistence with Hydro One’s giant transmission towers, and several generations worth of memories cherished by the street’s residents, have now been lost to the chainsaws.

Tree and vegetation maintenance?

Some 60 residents of Centennial Boulevard and concerned neighbours from surrounding streets showed up at Hydro One’s November 7th “update” session. “What we’d like to accomplish today,” the Hydro One spokesperson explained to the assembled locals, “is to give you a bit of an update for our tree and vegetation maintenance on the Boulevard here. We’d like to talk about how we’re going to work with you on a landscaping plan to restore and re-beautify the boulevard after the maintenance is done.”

“Tree and vegetation maintenance,” as the Centennial residents soon came to realize, is Hydro One spin for what we here in Old Ottawa East more colloquially refer to as “chopping down healthy, mature trees.”

Once it became clear to the assembled locals that their trees were indeed doomed, the mood of the crowd grew a little testy. Hydro One’s invitation to residents to work hand-in-hand with the utility over the coming months on “a plan to restore and re-beautify the boulevard” seemed to fall largely on deaf ears.

Two Centennial Boulevard kids climb one of the trees that Hydro One chopped down following the recent update session attended by more than 60 residents of the street and their neighbours. Photo by Lorne Abugov

Instead, a blizzard of pointed questions was launched in the Hydro One spokesperson’s way, mostly about the “tree and vegetation maintenance” part of his remarks. It wasn’t lost on the hockey fans in the crowd that a rebuild,..er, re-beautification is actually a lengthy and painful process that begins, not with beauty, but rather with an extended, joyless stage of “uglification.”

In its October issue, The Mainstreeter reported on the August 20th initial gathering between Hydro One and Centennial residents at which the utility acknowledged the unique nature of the neighbourhood, and agreed to re-think its initial proposal to eliminate more than half of the trees along the corridor from Brantwood Drive to Main Street. According to the utility’s rep, Hydro One used the intervening couple of months to reach, what he called, a “compromise.” In his return to the community, he thanked “both the community and the councillor [Shawn Menard] for working with us to find that compromise.”

What compromise?

If the audience seemed mystified by the so-called “compromise”, they might be forgiven. While Hydro One did meet with Councillor Menard between late August and early November, there was no evidence to suggest that the utility spoke to anyone in the community between the two sessions, let alone worked with them to achieve a compromise.

Nor were the parameters of the compromise clear to the residents. At both the August and November public gatherings, there was confusion and disagreement on the actual tree count on Centennial Boulevard – Hydro maintained there were 30 trees in total, while residents said that number was considerably inflated. I took a walk along the length of Centennial following the November session and counted a total of 23 trees on the street, including some of the multi-stem variety, which might account for the disparity in the count. But given the confused tree count, any attempt to suss out how many trees initially planned for elimination in August were in fact rescued from the chopping block by the November compromise between Hydro One and Councillor Menard is, at best, a mug’s game.

Insult to our intelligence

But back on the street, there was a moment of high drama when Hydro One revealed its total rebeautification budget for Centennial was a paltry $30,000. Of course, the utility’s spokesperson didn’t use the term paltry – he didn’t have to, because what followed immediately were several questions of the “are you kidding me?” variety. One resident intoned that these days he could hardly landscape his backyard for $30K, let alone re-beautify three blocks of city streets. Another resident told The Mainstreeter afterwards that the $30,000 budgeted by Ontario Hydro to underwrite the costs of its re-beautification plan was “shocking” and “an insult to our intelligence.”

When it was all over and the audience began to disperse, a number of disappointed residents lamented the fact that Hydro One didn’t offer up a single option that might have saved the nine trees – perhaps a trim here or there to some of the trees, instead of a wholesale annihilation. No one we spoke to felt that the outcome was anything even resembling a compromise. One disgruntled resident summarized her disappointment with what she had just witnessed in this way: “The trees are gone. Hydro One has them off their books. They got what they wanted. Case closed, next file.”

However one views the August and November public gatherings – whether as a forum for public participation and debate (which we don’t) or as a Hydro One issues management exercise (which we do), the final outcome of the drama that played out on Centennial Boulevard over the past three months was never really in doubt. Unquestionably, Hydro One holds the easement for the land. And while you might not trust Hydro One or their track record as impartial arborists, the utility is within its lawful rights to do with the land – and the trees – what it will.

But as an exercise in community relations, we can’t help but feel that November 7th was a local PR disaster for Hydro One. Whatever trust local residents may have had in the utility going into the update session, they surely have less of it today.

Residents of Centennial Boulevard will now awake each morning to nine giant scars on their boulevard left by the woodchippers. Gone is the pastoral beauty of mature adult crab-apples and other trees that graced the streetscape for half a century or more. Cold comfort indeed heading into the long, dreary winter of a rebuild, er, re-beautification that no one on Centennial wanted or needed.