Spring Cleaning Your Vegetation Management Program

By C. Troy Ross, President, ACRT and ACRT Pacific

It’s that time of year when many of us begin the familiar ritual of spring cleaning. This seasonal tradition goes beyond everyday tidying, focusing on deep-cleaning tasks that are often overlooked, like clearing out hidden dust behind furniture, wiping down high shelves, and cleaning inside appliances. The purpose is to refresh your space, eliminate built-up dirt, and create a cleaner, more organized environment for the months ahead.

Why not do the same practice with vegetation management programs?  Spring is the time when budgets have been refreshed and it is the doorstep for storm season and fire season.  What better time to do a comprehensive review, looking at neglected risk areas and creating a more organized strategy for the coming year and beyond?

Across the country, utilities are taking a hard look at the past year; storm costs, reliability performance, and increasing regulatory scrutiny. At the same time, budgets are tightening, rate pressure is growing, and customers have less patience than ever for outages.

And yet, one of the most important risk decisions for the next 12 months is being made right now.

Spring isn’t just the start of vegetation growth; it’s the point in the year that largely determines how resilient and defensible your system will be when summer storms and wildfire season arrive. More and more, vegetation management isn’t just a maintenance conversation. It’s an enterprise risk decision.

From Trim Cycle to Risk Strategy

For years, vegetation management programs were measured by cycle completion and miles trimmed. Those metrics still matter, but on their own, they don’t tell the full story anymore.

Today, vegetation management directly influences:

• SAIDI and SAIFI performance
• Storm restoration costs
• Wildfire exposure
• Regulatory confidence
• Rate case defensibility
• Insurance availability and affordability

The executive question has shifted. It’s no longer, “Did we complete the cycle?” It’s, “Can we defend our strategy under scrutiny?”  That shift is important, because after major events, those questions are coming.

We’re also seeing more utilities start to align vegetation management with broader enterprise risk frameworks by holding it to the same expectations around governance, documentation, and validation as other critical operational risks.

Why Spring Cleaning Matters

Spring gives you a relatively short window (about 90 days) that sets the tone for the rest of the year.

• Vegetation growth accelerates
• Contractor schedules become fixed
• Hurricane and wildfire preparedness efforts ramp up
• Regulators begin reviewing prior-year performance

What gets worked through now, how you prioritize work, how you oversee contractors, how strong your documentation is, often determines what you’ll be asked to explain later in Q3 and Q4.

Some utilities treat spring as a time to simply ramp up production. Others use it as a chance to step back and validate their approach by pressure-testing assumptions, tightening oversight, and making sure execution aligns with actual risk.

That second group tends to be in a much stronger position when the season intensifies.

Increasingly, the focus isn’t just on getting work done, it’s on being able to clearly explain, support, and defend the decisions behind it.

The Hidden Risk: Oversight

After a major outage or event, the first question is rarely whether trimming happened. Instead, the conversation quickly shifts to things like:

• Was the right work identified?
• Was it properly prioritized?
• Was it executed to standard?
• Is the documentation defensible?

Execution is what people see. Oversight is what determines credibility.

As expectations continue to rise, we’re seeing a greater emphasis on independent verification, stronger audit practices, and clear separation between identification, execution, and inspection.

In many cases, that also means bringing in more transparency — and sometimes third-party validation — to ensure decisions aren’t just sound, but clearly defensible. Because without that, even solid work can become difficult to stand behind when it matters most.

Five Questions to Ask This Quarter

Spring is a good time to step back, pressure-test your program, and clean away a few cobwebs:

1. Are we prioritizing based on risk or primarily on cycle?
2. Are identification, execution, and verification clearly separated?
3. Can we produce defensible documentation immediately if asked?
4. Are outage and vegetation data integrated at the circuit level?
5. Are we measuring miles trimmed or risk reduced?

How you answer those questions often says more about your program than any production metric.

A National Risk Environment

Extreme weather isn’t regional anymore. Large-scale events, and the scrutiny that follows, are happening across the country. Because of that, vegetation management is being viewed more and more through the lens of governance, risk, and accountability.

Utilities that are investing in stronger oversight, clearer documentation, and more rigorous validation are finding themselves better prepared; not just operationally, but in how they explain and defend their decisions afterward.

The Decision Point

Spring isn’t just another season on the calendar. It is a time of renewal and of new beginnings. It’s the point where strategy either holds up or starts to show gaps. By the time summer arrives, most of the outcomes are already in motion.

The real question is whether those decisions were driven primarily by production — or by a clear focus on risk, resilience, and defensibility.

For utilities operating in an environment with increasing scrutiny and complexity, the ability to demonstrate, not just perform, effective vegetation management is becoming a real differentiator. Spring cleaning of the VM program can be when the foundation gets renewed setting the stage for the trials to come.

Ready to take a closer look at your vegetation management program? Reach out to ACRT to start a conversation about improving risk visibility, oversight, and long-term performance.