As tens of thousands of Nashville Electric Service (NES) customers continue to go without power more than a week after Winter Storm Fern hit Middle Tennessee, The Tennessee Star’s lead reporter, Tom Pappert, said the prolonged outages and slow restoration efforts are tied directly to utility leadership decisions that shifted priorities away from core service reliability.
On Monday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, Pappert detailed how financial records show NES sharply reduced spending on vegetation management under CEO Teresa Broyles-Aplin, a move he argues directly contributed to the scale of outages caused by downed trees and limbs during the storm.
“They cut their tree trimming budget at Nashville Electric Service by about $7.4 million,” Pappert said, explaining that spending fell “from about $21 million to $13.8 million” in 2024, followed by only “a whopping 3 percent” increase in 2025.
He added, “It seems to me…this all goes back to the 2024 decision to save a buck.”
Pappert said the budget cuts were consistent with Broyles-Aplin’s publicly stated focus on preserving Nashville’s urban tree canopy.
He said NES leadership had been “interested in primarily preservation of the tree canopy,” citing Broyles-Aplin’s comments that “we would do species specific trimming because we don’t want to destroy the canopy and we have to live here too.”
Pappert said that philosophy translated into real budgetary consequences, noting that NES “saved a decent chunk of change, about 6 percent of their budget, by reducing their vegetation management contracting service.”
Furthermore, Pappert noted the reduction in tree trimming coincided with NES receiving federal funding tied to clean energy initiatives in the final months of the Biden administration.
He said NES was awarded $4 million through a Department of Energy program focused on sustainability and renewable energy.
“That money was supposed to be about keeping the service on, keeping it stable, but using renewable energy and green practices,” Pappert said, describing it as part of President Joe Biden’s push to achieve “net zero.”
However, he added, “From my understanding…I don’t think that money was used to manage vegetation.”
During the same period, Pappert also emphasized that NES expanded its internal focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
He noted the utility acknowledged conducting 102 DEI training sessions in 2023 and 2024, even as it reduced spending on vegetation management.
“They’re reducing their spending on necessary items like vegetation management during the same exact period that they are holding 102 DEI training sessions,” Pappert said.
He added that NES disclosed those efforts in its ESG reporting, which he said “they seem to have discontinued,” replacing it with a “community impact report.”
Regarding the utility’s broader shift in priorities, Pappert said NES leadership had essentially lost sight of its primary mission.
“I think that this power company, unfortunately, became more of a social club,” he said. “It became an opportunity for friends of Democratic mayors to be on yet another board, and it became an opportunity essentially to virtue signal using the customer’s money…This is yet another lesson about woke.”
Pappert also criticized Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s call for a commission to study the outage, predicting it would shield decision-makers from accountability.
“I think it is most likely to waste some taxpayer dollars and come up with a report that says it was unprecedented, it was really cold, and we needed more engineers,” Pappert said, adding that such a report would “absolve all stakeholders of any wrongdoing.”
Finally, Pappert said growing calls for the Tennessee General Assembly to intervene in NES governance could eventually result in legislative action.
“I would not be surprised at all, perhaps next year, maybe not in this legislative session, to see such a bill emerge,” he said.
Watch:
Live February 02 https://t.co/IT4yVHZ7rx
— Michael Patrick Leahy (@michaelpleahy) February 2, 2026
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Nashville Electric Service Services” by Nashville Electric Service.
What Tom said sounds true.