At the July 17th meeting at the Agricultural Center, a number of people asked the Met-Ed representatives about running the new line north via a seemingly-obvious and much shorter path, as opposed to the meandering “A” and “B” routes proposed by Met-Ed. (Those routes were proposed by Met-Ed after an earlier route was shifted around due to opposition from various individual land owners... beware, just because the line isn’t projected to be directly on your property now, doesn’t mean the plan won’t change!) The alternate community-proposed plan would apparently impact just two vacant residential properties and run along the edge of just one occupied property, as opposed to severely impacting a great number of people in the valley and hills along and to the north of Route 183; and is far shorter than the “A” and “B” routes as well. Here is a map of this short and sensible alternate route, as prepared by my neighbors.

(Side note: there are some who suspect that Met-Ed’s proposed routes are as indirect as they are because Met-Ed wants to make money by putting cell-phone antennas atop the transmission-line towers; and if you live in this area, you can see how sections of these routes run parallel to the sections of route 183 with poor reception... the initial proposed route did so even more closely. Met-Ed would be generating an ongoing revenue stream and we’d pay for it with lower property values!)

Going forward, when we raise objections to Met-Ed’s current proposals, it is important to rally behind an alternative route. Development can obviously be a contentious issue in and of itself, but objecting to running any new lines, period, would be a much, much harder battle to fight as the areas that the line is intended to serve are already well into the development process. (This fact should encourage us all to keep a close eye on what’s going on in local and regional government -- it’s far easier to uproot a sapling than a mature tree.)