Stump Grinding Near Utility Lines in Nashville, Tennessee

Metro Code 2.104.060 and Curb Strip Stump Removal

A homeowner in Nashville needs no permit to cut a tree standing in their own yard. Public trees are governed separately, under Metro Code section 2.104.060, which puts an urban forester's permit ahead of anyone damaging, destroying or removing one. The definition of public reaches into the street right-of-way, and on the pre-war grid that right-of-way begins at the back edge of your sidewalk and runs to the pavement.

The process is not onerous. Ten dollars covers the application. Beyond the fee, the code wants two notifications from you: one when the work begins and one when it is done. Utility companies hold an annual blanket permit, renewable each year. A homeowner does not, and neither does a contractor working for one.

The part worth taking seriously is the remedy. Where one is harmed or taken with no permit behind it, the code hands the repair-or-replace decision to the urban forester. The species, the size and the location of whatever goes back are Metro's call. The duty also sits with the parcel, not with whoever ran the saw that afternoon. So a stump on the strip on Holly Street, Ordway Place, Nebraska Avenue or 12th Avenue South is Metro's, we will pull the permit or wait for yours, and we will not grind it on a handshake. Metro Urban Forestry is on 615-862-6886.

One related point, because it confuses people every time. The tree in the strip is Metro's. Title 13 puts the cracked panel in front of that tree onto the abutting owner. They are two different legal objects with two different owners, and fixing one does not fix the other.

NES Clearance Rules and Stump Grinding at the Drop

Nashville Electric Service rewrote its vegetation standard after Winter Storm Fern. Radial clearance around its corridors went from ten feet to fifteen, with nothing permitted to overhang. Below the conductors it now cuts back to about ten feet off the power space. Ground equipment has its own envelope: six feet of open approach at the face of a pad-mounted transformer, three on the remaining sides. Circuits run on a three to four year trim cycle.

The distinction that actually affects a homeowner is primary versus secondary. NES trims and clears around primary distribution and transmission as routine work, and its contractors chip and haul what they cut. Where NES stops is the secondary: the drop that leaves the pole and lands on your wall. Its published position is that responsibility there belongs to the property owner.

There is a free service that goes with that, though, and it is underused: ask NES to pull the drop for the duration and they will, at no charge, which makes an awkward job an ordinary one. We make that call rather than dancing around a live conductor. Within ten feet of one, the law wants an OSHA line-clearance arborist, and that distance is not advisory.

What Tennessee 811 Marks Before a Nashville Stump Grind

Tennessee 811 is a communications centre, not a locating service. It notifies the member utilities and each of them sends its own locator. Three working days' notice is required, which is seventy-two hours excluding weekends and holidays, you may give up to ten working days, and a ticket stays valid for fifteen calendar days after the requested legal start date.

Inside the tolerance zone the rules change. The zone is the width of the buried facility plus two feet on either side, and excavation inside it has to be hand dug, potholed or soft dug. A grinding wheel is none of those three, so the wheel stops at the flag line and whatever is left comes out by hand or stays in the ground. We will tell you which before we start.

One detail that trips up homeowners and contractors alike: every person doing the excavating needs their own ticket. A homeowner's ticket does not cover the contractor working on their property, and a contractor's ticket does not cover the homeowner. We pull ours. Yours does not substitute for it and ours does not substitute for yours.

Private Lines Under a Nashville Front Yard Stump

Tennessee 811 does not cover private and customer-owned lines, and it will not arrange a private locator on your behalf. That list includes the water service running to the building, the sewer lateral, irrigation, propane, low-voltage landscape lighting, and the electric secondary running from a pull box or transformer to the meter.

Read that list against an old Nashville front yard and the problem is obvious. In the strip on a Woodbine, Glencliff or Charlotte Park block, a clay sewer lateral, a cast-iron water service, a gas run and an NES secondary can all share one six-foot ribbon of ground, and the water oak planted in 1948 is standing on top of the lot. The owner has to flag those or hire somebody to find them.

Septic is the version of this problem north and west of the city. Metro Public Health runs a standing septic assessment program for Davidson County properties, and in Bellevue off Old Harding Pike, in Whites Creek and across Joelton, the flat sunny part of the yard that a homeowner points at is very often the disposal field. A lateral at trench depth sits inside the twelve to twenty-four inch band a deep grind reaches, and a nine-thousand-pound machine tracked across shallow distribution pipe is a five-figure mistake. The tank lid and the field get located before the machine moves, the same as any utility.

Lines nobody will locate for you on a Davidson County lot

• Your own water line back from the meter, and the sewer lateral running out to the main
• Irrigation mains and lateral runs, plus the valve boxes, which sit at grind depth
• Invisible fence wire, usually buried two inches down in exactly the wrong place
• Low-voltage landscape lighting cable, often stapled along a root run
• Propane line from a tank to the house, common on the unsewered north and west side
• Electric secondary from a pull box or transformer to the meter, which is not NES's to mark
• Septic tank lid, distribution box and drain field laterals on Bellevue, Whites Creek and Joelton lots