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A piece of legislation circulating in Montgomery County would take direct aim at one of the Washington region’s most reviled villains. Under the new bill, Pepco would be required to give homeowners advance notice when the utility’s crews need to trim trees to access power lines.

WTOP reports that the Montgomery County Council heard last night from several frustrated residents and activists who said that Pepco crews don’t take care when cutting down branches or trees.

“Obviously dead or dying branches overhanging power lines need to be carefully removed, but Pepco’s contractors have devastated the gracious tree canopy,” Ken Bawer, a representative of the Maryland Native Plant Society, told the council, according to WTOP.

And one concerned resident even called Pepco “the butcher of Montgomery County.”

Pepco, naturally, would rather not be required to always call ahead, especially when it’s in the middle of an ongoing effort to clear vegetation from its power lines. “This bill undermines the new vegetation management standards issued just a few short weeks ago by the Maryland Public Service Commission,” Jerry Pasternak, Pepco’s vice president for Maryland, told WTOP.

Meanwhile, a recent glance at the Butcher of Montgomery County’s service outage map showed just sporadic outages in the county this morning.