A major conference on rights-of-way vegetation management this September in Cincinnati is expected to attract industry players from across the continent, including Canada.
“I won't say we get them all but we have quite a few Canadian utilities. I’m sure of one from most of the provinces,” said Phil Charlton, executive director of the Utility Arborist Association, which is partnering with the Arbor Day Foundation on the Trees & Utilities Conference.
The third annual event takes place Sept. 10-12 at the Duke Energy Convention Center. Organizers anticipate 550 to 600 attendees, with 10 to 15 percent coming from Canada, said Amber Morrison, a program operations manager with the Arbor Day Foundation.
“Our goal is to provide an educational and networking platform for attendees to be introduced to new technical information, partnership ideas and innovative practices that allow further professional development of the individual attendee and continued enhancement of their work to grow and maintain healthy trees in their communities,” Morrison said by email.
Not only does the conference home in on rights-of-way vegetation management, including by mechanical means or with herbicides, “it is the conference,” she said. This year a big program focus is utilities and environmental sustainability, while last year a major focus was utilities and wildfire management, Morrison added.
Charlton described the conference as a major event for the industry.
“We get most of the vendors. We get quite a few equipment suppliers. We get the applicator companies and the manufacturers. A lot of consultants, are there,” Charlton said.
The UAA’s membership is predominantly electrical utilities. However, the association has also been reaching out to pipeline companies in recent years. And this year, an organization called the Rights of Way Habitat Working Group, whose work encompasses highway rights-of-way, will present a workshop at the conference. Charlton also expects attendees from railways as well as from non-governmental environmental organizations, such as the Wildlife Habitat Council.
Agenda highlights
The conference agenda features a range of presentations, including the following:
• A premiere screening of The Pollinators , followed by a panel discussion that includes Darrell Gaudet of AltaLink and University of Delaware entomology professor Doug Tallamy;
• Climate Change and Managing for Resilient ROW;
• Regulatory Mechanisms for Promoting Habitat on ROWs;
• Identifying Vegetation Encroachment;
• A panel on Habitat Studies on Insect Pollinator on ROW;
• Professionalizing Utility VM Programs;
• Sustainability Through Forestry in the Utility Industry;
• A panel on ROW Vegetation as an Asset; and
• Women in Vegetation Management Workshop, which requires additional registration.
“The last few years our industry has been trying to promote women in arboriculture in utility veg management,” said Charlton, who has a PhD in forest science from the University of West Virginia. “It's just a workshop to help them understand how they can get involved and then the women can mentor one another. Hopefully we will be able to become more diverse over time.”
Exhibitors aplenty
The conference coincides with a Rights-of-Way as Habitat Working Group Meeting, Sept. 9 and 10. It includes a pollinator habitat field demonstration at a location yet to be determined on Sept. 9, afternoon sessions also on Sept. 9 at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden, and breakout sessions and peer-to-peer exchanges Sept. 10 at the Duke Energy Center.
Trees & Utilities also has a trade show. As of early June, the show has sold out all 98 exhibition spaces, Charlton said. Exhibitors are a who’s who of the tree care industry. They include Asplundh Tree Expert LLC, Bandit Industries Inc., Custom Truck One Source, Davey Tree Expert Company, Jarraff Industries Inc., Morbark LLC, Progress Rail, Sennebogen LLC, Vermeer Corporation, and Wright Tree Service.
Sennebogen will bring a 718 custom-engineered tree-care handler to the conference exhibition space.Photo: Sennebogen
Jarraff Industries will display at least one of its three products — most likely the Jarraff all-terrain tree trimmer — at the trade show, said Kenny Jones, national sales manager. “It’s the fastest way to trim trees from point A to B,” Jones said. (Jarraff’s other products are its LineBacker mulcher, and its Mini-Jarraff trimmer.)
It will be Jarraff’s third straight year at the event.
“You know, it’s been a pretty good conference the last two years, ever since they re-started it back up,” Jones said. “A lot of participation, a lot of people showing up.”
The Arbor Day Foundation introduced the conference in 1994 and ran it until 2009, when it took a hiatus “to assess the utility arboriculture and vegetation management education and training needs and also strengthen a long-standing partnership that existed between the Arbor Day Foundation and Utility Arborist Association,” Morrison explained.
A few years ago, the UAA decided to hold its own conference, Charlton said. “We liked the name. So we approached Arbor Day and asked them if they’d want to partner with us,” he said.
In 2017, the event was reborn.
Canadian content
Neil Thiessen, a founder of the precursor to the Alberta-based Professional Vegetation Managers Association, has attended several Trees & Utilities Conferences over the years, although he won’t be attending this year because he recently retired after 50 years in the industry.
In the past, though, he’d count 50 to 70 Canadians in attendance. “And when it was held in Ontario, there was probably 150,” Thiessen said.
Thiessen is also a past-president of the UAA, so he knows Charlton and his organization well. And Thiessen was a founder of the Utility Vegetation Managers Association, which is based in Leduc, Alta., also home of the PVMA.
The UVMA, established in 2012, primarily represents the business interests of utility right-of-way managers. It has only about 20 members. Contractors are welcome but they don’t sit on the UVMA’s board of directors.
“This is a place where the utilities could sit down together in a boardroom and look at regulatory things, look at policies,” Thiessen said. “The UAA has been very active in creating best management practices, so we looked and reviewed all of the best practices and said, ‘Now do these word for word fit here in Canada?’ In some cases they did. In other cases they didn’t.”
Training gap
An impetus for founding the UVMA was the discovery of a training gap between senior utilities vegetation managers and junior people entering the vocation. “So rather than having younger people reinvent the wheel, which some of us have seen utilities do many times over, we created a two-year online, college level, professional development training program,” Thiessen said.
The UVMA is now partnering with the UAA on that program, which was originally based out of the Southern Institute of Technology in Calgary. It will eventually relocate to a university in the U.S.
“Somebody entering this course should have worked in right-of-way management with a contractor, or with a consultant within the utility for two or three or four years, or you’re going to struggle,” Thiessen said. “Because without industry knowledge it’s going to be tough. It is business-oriented. This course is focused on right-of-way management, from planning, financial, contracting, regulatory, through to full implementation.”
The PVMA has a much broader membership base of about 200. Formed as the Industrial Vegetation Management Association of Alberta in 1978, the PVMA includes contractors, municipalities, counties, manufacturers, chemical companies and tree service providers.
“It’s an individual membership organization that represents pretty much every company of any significance doing work in this province,” Thiessen said.
Put another way, the PVMA covers integrated vegetation management in its broadest scope, whereas the UVMA concentrates on utility rights-of-way work — like comparing the Tree Care Industry Association Expo (taking place in Pittsburgh this November) with the Trees & Utilities Conference.
“This is about utilities, and right-of-way management,” Thiessen said. “It’s the conference for utility people, no question about it.”
Good overall exposure
Among the exhibitors at Trees & Utilities is Montreal-based CEATI International. CEATI — which stands for the Centre for Energy Advancement through Technological Innovation — represents electrical utilities in Canada and the US as well as elsewhere in the world.
Amanda Sotos, CEATI’s vegetation program manager, will attend along with program director Alex Mogilevsky, and technical advisor Rob Young. The purpose of their attendance at the Trees and Utilities Conference is to provide information about the organization, particularly its Vegetation Management Program.
“Attending is also a way for us to keep up and make sure that we’re talking about the right topics, covering the right projects, etc.,” Sotos said. “It’s good overall exposure and allows us to keep up with the industry.”
CEATI’s utility members are from both transmission and distribution in the Vegetation Management Program, however, one of their primary focuses in the group is transmission and rights-of-ways.
As such, transmission work will be one of the focal points of CEATI’s own Vegetation Management Conference taking place this December in San Antonio, Texas. (See related story).
Leading up to that, Sotos is looking forward to attending some of the many presentations at Trees & Utilities, as she did at last year’s ISA conference in Columbus, Ohio.
“You’re in one place and you’re able to get a lot of information in a really short period of time,” Sotos said. “So we’ll definitely take advantage of the opportunity and listen to some of the presentations.”
Big machine coming
Also exhibiting at Trees & Utilities is Sennebogen, which recently introduced its 718 custom-engineered tree-care handler to the North American market. The company, headquartered in Straubing, Germany, will even have one of the massive machines at its booth, said Ryan Kolb, Americas marketing manager.
“It’s one of our machines that are really geared towards the tree care specialists,” said Kolb, who joined Sennebogen this January after 12 years with Ingersoll Rand, whose brands include Trane and Thermo King “It’s a machine that’s used for road clearing and maintenance. It can be used on golf courses, and for storm cleanup. It’s more of an urban forestry type of machine for the tree-care specialist. It’s a machine that can do tree removal several times faster than a multi-person crew.”
“This is primarily a networking opportunity to showcase our machine, as well as to gather feedback and market needs from potential customers,” Kolb said.
It won’t be possible to demonstrate the 718 from the show floor. But Kolb is working with a dealer in the Cincinnati area to arrange live demos after the show — similar to what Sennebogen did at its Stanley, N.C., facility after the last TCI Expo in Charlotte.
For the most part, exhibitors at Trees & Utilities are bringing in smaller pieces of equipment, Charlton said. The conference focus is on big jobs though. Integrated vegetation management typically involves cross-country rights-of-ways and their massive towers.
“Ours is more oriented towards the management side of things,” Charlton said.
For more information, visit www.treesandutilities.org .
— Keith Norbury