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City of Great Falls to Cut Down Hundreds of Trees

City of Great Falls to Cut Down Hundreds of Trees

By KFBB News Team

Story Created: Mar 17, 2010 at 4:16 PM MST

Story Updated: Mar 17, 2010 at 4:16 PM MST

One of the advantages of living in an older part of Great Falls is all the mature trees. But this year, the city is removing trees at an alarming rate, and we wanted to find out why.

Driving around Great Falls, you can see a lot of these mulch piles lining the streets and parks. Turns out the mulch is all that's left when one of the city’s beloved mature trees is removed.

"A lot of our mature trees are just that--they're mature,” explains Great Falls City Forester Todd Seymanski. “We've had a lot weather situations that have not helped the health."

Weather situations like the severe cold snap in April of 2008 that hit, just as many trees were starting to bud. Now—nearly two years later—781 severely damaged trees will be cut down, the stumps ground into mulch, and then new trees will be planted.

"Unfortunately we haven't been planting a lot of trees, so we have a big gap in the amount if mature trees and the next age class,” Seymanski says. “We hope to get that under control because for the past few years we've been losing more mature trees than we've been planting."

And while the city does not have enough money to replace all the dead trees—like those affected by the mountain pine beetle or dutch elm disease—they can replace all of the trees lost to the cold. That's thanks to an insurance policy on all of the city's trees that were counted in 2003.

Many of those trees are located in the Boulevard District—marked with a green dot. The news is worse for some, with four of the six mature trees on this corner lot are slated to be cut down.

A third party removal service will cut down those trees in the coming weeks, and the new trees should be planted this summer.

Officials tell us the pine beetle is still a big problem for trees across the state. They're recommending spraying any surviving pine trees this year.

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