Following an hour-long hearing Thursday night that showed public sentiment evenly divided over removal of a Japanese Zelkova tree adjacent the post office, Tree Warden Matt Klimkosky decided the tree must go.
The removal will include excavating the stump and root system prior to pouring a new sidewalk. A replacement tree will be planted in September.
Klimkosky, an arborist, marked the tree for removal because of its proximity to ongoing sidewalk construction in the village center. It was feared that the roots of the 30-year-old ornamental tree would be damaged and, indeed, it was revealed at the public hearing that breaking up the sidewalk had already severed a large root.
Klimkosky said he worried both about the tree’s health, and that it might have been made unstable and could topple over in a storm.
Opinions about the tree’s future varied even among the arborists and horticulturalists in the room. Both Nash Pradhan, a landscape designer and horticulturalist, and John Anderson, a biologist and former executive director of Aton Forest, believe the tree could survive. Klimkosky first leaned toward trying to save it but, with the root severed, became more pessimistic.
“I would like to save the tree, but what if it succumbs?” he asked. “We would have to have a contractor come and do excavation around the new sidewalk. We wouldn’t be able to grind the stump or plant a new tree.”
“It’s a miracle this tree is surviving,” he continued. “It’s living in an inhospitable environment of asphalt and concrete. It’s periodically trimmed by the power company, its lower limbs are whacked by trucks, the town crew puts down salt on the pavement every winter.”
A 9 to 7 straw vote at the meeting showed a nearly even division of opinion about trying to save it, but Jeffrey Torrant, the contractor removing the old sidewalk and a fiscally conservative member of the Board of Finance, said he has pulled thousands of root systems out of the earth over the course of his career. The process usually leaves a “hole three times the size of the tree.”
“If the tree dies in a year, why would you endanger a $50,000 sidewalk?” he said. “We don’t want to be penny wise and pound foolish.”