There is a story in today’s Star Tribune – click here for the story – about an arrest of a property owner who leveled a shot gun at a forestry contractor who was inspecting a diseased tree in her backyard. The Strib story is mostly correct, except that the contractor wasn’t there to remove the tree. he was there to assess the tree in order to give the City a bid to have it removed. The City was getting a bid for the cost to remove the tree because the property owner was unresponsive to our requests to remove the diseased tree in the first place.
The City, pursuant to State Law, requires the owners of diseased trees to remove them so that the spread of infectious tree diseases can be halted, or at least slowed. State law is pretty specific about this. Once a diseased tree is identified a property owner is obliged to remove the tree. If they don’t remove the diseased tree, the City is obliged to remove the tree and then assess the cost of the removal back to the property owner’s tax bill. We use a number of different private forestry contractors to do this kind of work because they can do it faster and cheaper than City staff, which means we can pass along that savings to the property owner, if we are the ones doing the removal.
In Eden Prairie we get an extraordinary amount of cooperation from property owners on this issue. A lot of this work happens at this time of year because tree removal equipment can be moved in and out of frozen yards without causing damage to the landscape. Nobody likes to remove a tree, but people understand why it needs to be done and most of them take care of it without incident.
You know, you just never know what might be waiting around the corner for you sometimes. This could have been a real tragedy. I’m glad that cooler heads prevailed and nobody got hurt.
