Utility tree markings: what the paint, the ribbon and the tag mean

A mark on a tree is an instruction written for the crew that comes later. In PG&E territory the shape carries the work and the color carries the program year. A dot means pruning, an X means removal, and red is the 2026 distribution cycle. The notice carrying dates arrives separately.

In March a valley oak on a rural parcel picks up a red dot, sprayed at knee height on the side of the trunk facing the road, about four inches across. Nobody knocks. No paper appears on the door. The tree stands 30 feet from the nearest phase of a distribution span, and a crew arrives in July with a chipper.

Every part of that mark carries information. The shape records what work was prescribed. The color records which program and which year prescribed it. The height and the chosen side record where the crew will be looking from when they come down the road. What the mark leaves out is how dangerous the tree is, how long the owner has, and who decided.

The paint is an instruction to the crew

PG&E's public description of what its inspectors do is one sentence long:

We will usually mark trees that need trimming or removal with paint or ribbon.

That sentence sits on PG&E's vegetation management page. The step it describes lives in Utility Procedure TD-7102P-01, "Vegetation Management Distribution Inspection," Revision 4. It was published on October 17, 2025, and took effect on November 15, 2025. Section 5 has the inspector mark the tree once work has been identified. Section 6 has the inspector try to reach the owner. They are consecutive sections and separate obligations, and each one can happen without the other.

Section 6.1 sets the contact duty:

The VMI must ATTEMPT to contact the customer/property owner directly AND DESCRIBE the work to be performed.

IF the customer/property owner does not respond to the first contact attempt, THEN ATTEMPT to contact the customer/property owner up to two more times AND ENTER the details and method of the notification attempts into the system of record.

Three attempts, each logged with the method, the name of the person reached, the date and time, and the outcome. That is the conversation the paint is meant to be accompanied by, and what lands on the door when the conversation misses is a separate artifact with its own rules. PG&E says as much in plain terms on the same page: it tries to notify owners before planned work as a courtesy, and in some cases an owner will get no notice at all.

Between the mark and the saw there is usually a season. PG&E's Tree Marking Fact Sheet, document CCC-0126-6073 dated April 10, 2026, puts it this way:

Typically, we will return to perform tree safety work within a few months after inspections.

The March oak worked in July is the ordinary case, and so is the March oak still standing in October.

The color is a calendar, not a severity code

This is the single most misread thing on a marked trunk. Appendix E of Revision 4, headed "Tree Marking Colors," assigns each color to a program, and four of the colors rotate on a four year cycle offset between distribution and transmission.

Program	Color
Distribution 2020, 2024, 2028; transmission 2022, 2026, 2030	Orange
Distribution 2021, 2025, 2029; transmission 2023, 2027, 2031	Green
Distribution 2022, 2026, 2030; transmission 2020, 2024, 2028	Red
Distribution 2023, 2027, 2031; transmission 2021, 2025, 2029	White
Fire and storm response	Fluorescent green
Estimating arborist	Pink
Transmission reliability	Blue
Enhanced vegetation management, fuel reduction, Hazard Patrol	Yellow
Cover paint	Black, brown
VM Quality Control, flagging only	Pink with a pattern

Read the top four rows against the calendar. In 2026 a distribution tree gets red and a transmission tree gets orange, and those same two colors swap places in 2028. So the red dot on the March oak says distribution, current cycle.

An orange mark found on the same parcel in the same month is either transmission work for 2026 or a distribution mark left from 2024. Which of the two lines runs over the parcel decides which reading applies, and the pole hardware over the fence answers it faster than the paint does.

The rotation is also why one trunk can carry two colors. New marks go on over the old ones with some of the earlier mark left showing. That overlap is a deliberate instruction in the procedure rather than sloppiness. What the layered paint records about a re-prescription is worth reading before treating the older color as live work.

The rotation is also why local restatements of the key go stale. A Town of Fairfax page about PG&E's orange tags, posted January 31, 2020, told residents that orange tags represent trees a contractor will be trimming, and that a whole tree deemed unsafe "will be marked with a red X, and it will be completely removed."

The removal in that sentence is carried by the X. In PG&E's current table red is a program color, held by distribution in 2022, 2026 and 2030 and by transmission in 2020, 2024 and 2028. A reader who learned in 2020 that red means removal will misread the red dots going up across distribution circuits this year.

A dot means pruning and an X means removal

The shape is the part that keeps its meaning across years. PG&E's customer fact sheet prints four:

Mark on the tree	What the fact sheet says it means
Dots or circle	Tree needs to be trimmed
Tape or ribbon	Tree needs safety work
X or cross	Tree needs to be removed
Tag	Tree requires ongoing work

The ribbon row is worth a moment. Inside the procedure, flagging is an alternative method of marking rather than a different grade of finding, and the flag color comes out of the same Appendix E table as the paint.

A ribbon therefore carries a program year in exactly the way a painted dot does, and an orange ribbon and an orange dot in the same year say the same thing about which program owns the tree. The fact sheet's separate row for ribbon describes the medium, and the color is still doing the work.

Which shape the inspector sprayed is the prescription decision, and the one page of criteria that drives the choice between removal and pruning is a subject of its own. What the shape settles for a landowner standing under the tree is narrower: a dot means the tree stays and loses limbs, and what a directionally pruned crown looks like afterward surprises most people more than the mark did.

A dot also has a boundary, and the CPUC has published where it falls. The Commission's own homeowner brochure, produced with CAL FIRE, states it:

The CPUC requires utilities to prune or remove only vegetation that could damage or fall into the overhead conductors, and authorizes funding for this maintenance work. Utilities may not use this money to perform special services for individual property owners not related to mandated vegetation management work. Further, utilities are responsible for cutting only the parts of the tree that could fall into the overhead conductors. Additional work on trees or branches that do not threaten utility facilities is the customer's responsibility.

That is why a dot lands on one oak in a row of five, and why a crew that takes three limbs off the conductor side will leave the dead limb hanging over the driveway. The funded scope is the span, and the clearance the span owes is what the inspector was measuring against.

Two dots, and a mark PG&E's own pages disagree about

Section 3 of Appendix E lists markings the company has retired:

Two dots meant facility protect. SE meant special equipment. Instead, the need for special equipment or methods is recorded in the tree record.

PG&E's help center article on markings still answers the same question differently:

A "dot" means trimming/pruning · An "X" means removal · A "double dot" means a minimum amount of tree work is required to protect the electric asset.

One of those is the field procedure in force since November 15, 2025. The other is the customer FAQ. A landowner finding two dots on a trunk today is most likely looking at an older mark from the years when facility protect was sprayed that way, and the safest reading of it is no reading at all.

PG&E resolves this by telephone rather than in print, and the fact sheet gives the address: treesafety@pge.com, or 1-800-743-5000, for questions about specific markings on trees on your property. The person who can actually answer is the inspector who made the mark, which is why the pole number matters more than a photograph of the paint.

A tree can be prescribed without being marked

Table 5 of Revision 4 has a third method, and it is the absence of one:

NOTE: The VMI may not be able to paint or flag a tree due to customer Interference or unsafe terrain. IF the VMI cannot paint or flag a tree, THEN UPDATE the tree record with the code "CNP" (cannot paint) or "CNF" (cannot flag) AND INCLUDE a description of the tree's location within the span.

Take the second oak on the same parcel, growing out of a cut bank the inspector could photograph from the road and could not safely climb. It carries CNF and a written sentence placing it between two numbered poles. The crew works from the record rather than from the trunk, and that tree is as fully prescribed as the one wearing the red dot.

The same note names customer interference as a reason a tree goes unmarked. An owner who waves an inspector off the driveway has changed what is on the tree and has changed nothing in the prescription. What the pre-inspection produced before anyone reached for the paint is the document that survives the conversation.

The word tag means three different things

"Tag" is the word in this vocabulary that carries the most freight, and a landowner is likely to meet all three senses in the same month.

The first is the small metal one. PG&E describes it on the vegetation management page:

As part of a pilot program in select areas, we may place a small metal tag on a tree. These tags help us plan safety work, reduce future risks and reduce visits to certain properties.

That tag is an inventory marker. It identifies a stem so the same stem can be found again, and it says nothing about work in the current cycle.

The second is the fact sheet's row, "Tag: Tree requires ongoing work," which is the same object described from the owner's side. A tree that the utility expects to come back to is a tree it wants to be able to identify without re-deriving it from a map.

The third never appears on a tree at all. Inside the procedure a Priority tag is a record, and it is the one with a clock attached. Revision 2 of the same procedure spells the clock out:

Priority 1 tags must be mitigated within 24 hours of identification when reported. Priority 2 tags must be mitigated within 20 business days, unless constrained.

Revision 4 moved those timeframes into a separate document, TD-7102P-17, "Vegetation Management Priority Tag," and kept the vocabulary. So a homeowner told their tree "has been tagged" should ask which kind. A metal tag on the bark and a Priority 1 in the database are separated by about 24 hours of urgency, and what authority exists to act inside that window is a different question again.

One practical note on where to look this up. The copy of TD-7102P-01 on PG&E's own website is still Revision 2 from June 2023. In that copy the front appendix list calls Appendix E "Tree Marking Colors" while the printed appendix pages are headed as Appendix D instead. Revision 4, the version in force, reached the public through PG&E's 2026 to 2028 base Wildfire Mitigation Plan filing at the Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety. There the marking colors sit at Appendix E and the numbering agrees with itself.

Marks on the ground belong to a different law

Paint on the dirt, the driveway or the curb near a pole is usually a different program entirely. Underground locating is governed by Government Code section 4216, and subdivision (n)(1) defines what the marks have to look like:

"Locate and field mark" means to indicate the existence of any owned or maintained subsurface installations by using the guidelines in Appendix B of the "Guidelines for Operator Facility Field Delineation" published in the most recent version of the Best Practices guide of the Common Ground Alliance and in conformance with the uniform color code of the American Public Works Association.

USA North 811, the regional notification center for northern and central California, publishes that code. Orange on the ground means communication, alarm or signal lines. Red means electric power. White outlines the proposed excavation, and pink flags are temporary survey marks. Those colors describe what is buried, and section 4216 reaches excavation rather than vegetation clearance.

The confusion runs the other way too, and PG&E treats it as a defect. Section 2 of Appendix E lists four marking errors:

• Painting a crumbly dirt hillside, a cut bank, below a tree.

• Getting paint on a road or curb or fence, which could be considered graffiti.

• Flagging that is not the current cycle's color.

• Flagging on surrounding vegetation, such as blackberry bushes around an oak that requires work.

Paint on the curb is on the company's own error list. An owner who finds it there has found something the procedure already calls wrong, and the phone number on the fact sheet is the route to having it covered.

What to do with the mark you have

Four things make a later conversation short, and all four take about five minutes on the day the mark appears.

• Photograph the mark with a hand or a tape measure in the frame for scale.

• Photograph the nearest pole so the number and tags on it are legible. The record is organized by span, and the pole number finds the tree faster than an address does.

• Write down the date you first saw it, because the prescription and the visit are separated by months and the gap between them is the thing most often misremembered.

• Note whether the paint is on one stem or several, because the funded scope reaches only the parts that could fall into the conductor.

Then call the utility that owns the line. PG&E takes questions about specific markings at treesafety@pge.com and 1-800-743-5000, and its Report It program accepts photographs of a tree you think is too close, with a notice back when the issue is under review or has been addressed.

Outside PG&E territory the utility's own line is the answer. Southern California Edison states that all tree trimming is done as part of its annual vegetation management work at no additional cost to the customer.

San Diego Gas and Electric states that when its inspectors or tree crews need access to a property they provide advance notification, usually by phone call or a door notice. The color table above belongs to PG&E's own procedure and carries no authority on an Edison or SDG&E circuit, so a mark in those territories is a question for the number on the notice.

The last thing the mark decides is the wood. A dot means limbs and an X means a stem, and where that material ends up when the crew leaves is usually the question that follows the one about the paint.

Further reading

• What to expect during a utility line clearance visit: The crew that arrives months after the paint, and what they are working from.

• Understanding door hangers and utility vegetation notices: The artifact that carries dates and a name, which the paint never does.

• Tree removal vs. pruning: how the utility decides: The decision behind the choice of a dot or an X, and the one page of criteria that drives it.

Frequently asked questions

What does an orange mark on my tree mean in PG&E territory?

Orange is a program year, not a severity level. Appendix E of PG&E Utility Procedure TD-7102P-01, Revision 4, assigns orange to distribution program years 2020, 2024 and 2028, and to transmission program years 2022, 2026 and 2030. An orange mark seen in 2026 is therefore either transmission work for the current cycle or a surviving distribution mark from 2024 or 2020. The shape sprayed in that orange is what tells you the work: a dot for pruning, an X for removal.

Does a painted X mean the tree will definitely be removed?

It means removal was prescribed by the inspector and written into the tree record. The paint itself carries no schedule and no authority. PG&E's customer fact sheet says crews typically return within a few months after inspections and that timing may vary with crew safety and weather. What happens between the X and the saw is the notification step, which the same procedure treats as a separate obligation from marking.

My tree was marked months ago and nobody came. What happened?

That is the ordinary case. PG&E's Tree Marking Fact Sheet states that crews typically return within a few months after inspections, and that timing may vary depending on crew safety and weather conditions. Marks are also sprayed over in later cycles rather than removed, so a faded mark under a fresh one records a prescription from an earlier program year rather than outstanding work.

Nobody marked my tree, but the crew says it is on their list. Is that a mistake?

Probably not. Table 5 of Revision 4 covers the case where the inspector cannot paint or flag, because of unsafe terrain or because the owner interfered. The inspector then records the code CNP or CNF in the tree record together with a written description of the tree's location within the span. The crew works from that record, and an unmarked tree can carry a live prescription.

Can I paint over the mark or pull the ribbon off?

The utility has its own cover paint for marks it decides are wrong. Appendix E of Revision 4 lists black and brown against cover paint, and the marking guidelines direct incorrect marks to be covered with them. Removing a mark yourself changes nothing in the tree record, which is where the prescription actually lives, and it removes the one thing the crew uses to find the right stem. PG&E gives treesafety@pge.com and 1-800-743-5000 for questions about specific markings.