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TREE MAINTENANCE PROGRAM DELAYED AGAIN

City council has once again decided to avoid the sticky problem of financing a proper maintenance program for city-owned trees. Two months before the 2003 election, the council adopted a decision in principle to support trimming of city trees at least once every five years, but then failed to fund it in the 2004 budget. Now they’ve decided to leave it out of the 2005 budget as well, and postpone a funding decision until sometime later this year.

The city officially tries to trim city-owned trees once every twelve years, but only within the boundaries of the old city of Hamilton. However, a current backlog of 6900 outstanding citizen complaints means that the trimming schedule is not being followed. The accepted standard for tree maintenance is a minimum five-year cycle, with high use areas such as parks recommended for maintenance on a one to three-year cycle. There is currently no maintenance program for trees in city parks.

Forestry staff are recommending a five-year cycle that would apply to the trees within the entire urban area of the amalgamated city, but in February council balked at the annual $7 million a year expenditure, even when offered a phase-in process that would mean spending only $1.4 million in 2005.

Instead the council decided last week to allocate $1 million in capital monies to try and just deal with the backlog. Half the money would be used for additional equipment and half for the actual trimming work even though the latter is clearly an operating expense not a capital one.

Chad Collins called the plan a “band-aid” approach and pointed out that it doesn’t address staff warnings that the city may be sued if it doesn’t have a proper maintenance program. “We pretty much end up where we were last year and that is with a program that quite frankly doesn’t meet the standards,” he declared.

Collins said he’s hearing from the public on the issue. “The calls that I’m getting are just increasing, month over month”. He pointed out that even if the council agreed to the tree maintenance program, it would take some time to get it running. “You know we need to set up the contracts, we need to determine whether or not we’re doing this internally or externally, and we need to set up that plan,” he said. “And if we’re just starting discussion mid-year then that process undoubtably takes us into 2006 which does little to address this problem in 2005.”

Bryan Shynal, the director of the city’s operating and maintenance division, acknowledged that the city has had “a rather unfriendly recent past practice” in tree maintenance. “In essence, the backlog is just the first step” he said. “Really what’s required here is a commitment to implement base funding adjustments to service at the prescribed service level of five years.”

Reprinted from CATCH. You can receive all their free news updates by sending an email to CATCH@cogeco.ca.