(Spencer)– The Spencer City Council Monday approved a motion to hire a professional service to trim low hanging trees over city right-of-way. The city will pay $175 per man hour not to exceed $50,000. Bob Fullhart, the city’s Parks and Recreation Director, told the council it would transfer that responsibility from the property owner to the city…
“One of things that for me that I see and I identify is like when we do the forced pruning, some of that stuff is originating above the point, but it’s still the homeowner’s responsibility because it’s arching down and getting to that point. Ideally we would be eliminating a lot of that stuff, and yes, we would be taking on a little bit more responsibility but with that being said, things are being pruned the way that, by trained professional, educated, people.”
Fullhart says the goal is to keep those trees healthy for as long as possible…
“It’s going to be a lot of focus on the upper canopy. It will cover, we’ll start on one part of town and just work our way down. It will cover every tree that’s in the right-of-way, but the focus being on our large, mature trees, corrective pruning, which is going to help reduce storm damage, increase the lifespan of some of these trees and keep them in place a lot longer for us. So it’s getting in more into the forestry management versus just removing trees, taking out trees, or waiting for the problems to show up. Hopefully we can identify this stuff early enough and get it taken care of and have these trees stand up a lot longer.”
Fullhart says the the city would be divided into quadrants as part of the trimming process.
