Twenty-five
well-established trees at Dogwood Park East--a few of them monsters--will be
removed late this summer by a NIPSCO contractor.
The trees, 19
maples and nine oaks, are located at the southeast intersection of 1100N and
23rd street, and have overgrown a “critical” power line.
So NIPSCO’s
contracted arborist, Andrea Nichols of Arbor Metrics, told the Chesterton
Park Board at its meeting Tuesday evening.
Simply “trimming
the trees to minimum spec would remove 25 percent of the canopy” and badly
disfigure them in the process, Nichols noted. “And I have no confidence they
would survive.”
“Wrong trees, wrong
place,” she added.
So they have to
come down, at no cost of course to Chesterton. Nichols, however,
acknowledged that in a town which, for nearly a quarter of a century, has
annually received the Tree City USA designation, there are bound to be some
disheartened residents. “These are long established trees so I absolutely
expect some pushback from the community,” she said.
President Candy
Tucker concurred, recalling a tree-trimming debacle a couple of years ago at
Chesterton Park, where a different NIPSCO contractor trimmed several trees
along West Porter Ave. to within an inch of their lives. “I think we could
have some irate people.”
To mitigate the
tree removal as much as possible, Nichols said, NIPSCO will replace them on
a one-for-one basis but will also provide additional funding, which could be
used, for example, to plant an arboretum with signage.
The thing of it is,
Nichols told the board, the trees need to be removed as soon as possible,
and Arbor Metrics would like to begin cutting in two or three weeks.
Members, mindful of
the upcoming Chesterton Art Fair at Dogwood Park East, during the first
weekend in August, asked Nichols whether possibly the operation could be
postponed until after the event. Nichols said that it could, but that--in an
emergency--Arbor Metrics reserves the right to do what needs to be done.
Tree replacement
will commence in the fall, with plantings likely in early September.