Until recently, Forest Park’s public works maintained and removed trees around the village by taking requests from residents when those on a parkway hung too low over the street or were dying.
Two or three staff members in the public works’ in-house forestry department also went out for tree trimming “whenever we had chances to do it” with “outdated” equipment, said Sal Stella, director of public works.
But that changed in 2021, when the village received a matching grant of around $9,000 from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources to help finance the Urban Forestry Management Plan. This plan funded the inventory of 3,335 trees by the public works’ Geographic Information System and the creation of an outline for how to maintain them, and plant more, over the next decade or so.
“When I got on as director three years ago, one of my main things that I wanted to do was to make sure that all these trees were being taken care of,” Stella said.
While trees fight climate change and provide health benefits, those with low-hanging canopies and branches can damage vehicles and, during storms, create debris that becomes hazardous, Stella said.
When inventory started in the spring of 2022, the public works and arborists from the Great Lakes Urban Forestry Management visited all 3,335 trees on the parkways of village property — plus 18 stumps and 392 planting spaces — measured their size and determined each one’s species, age and condition.
While no trees were in critical condition, eight were in the substantial risk category and removed by village public works and Davis Tree Care of Oak Park and River Forest in the months following the inventory. Many of them were silver maples.
“They are prone to be trees that, in their prime, looked nice, and that’s why a lot of them were planted. But when they show their age, they start to hollow from within,” Stella said. “That’s why they’re the ones that fall all the time, they become very brittle.”
While a majority of the remaining trees had no observed risk, another 124 had elevated risk, 91 which require pruning and 27 that need to be removed.
Davis Tree Care is trimming and tending to the 124 trees, covering three or four blocks every Friday, over the next three to five years. Stella updates the Geographic Information System regularly, accounting for every tree that is taken down.
Davis Tree Care and the village’s public works will continue keeping tabs on the trees to see if any have degraded since they first took inventory, and Stella said he plans to take stock of all Forest Park’s trees again.
Until then, efforts will focus on enhancing existing trees and, in the 392 inventoried spaces, planting new ones, which happens every fall and spring.
Friday, the public works announced that it’s time for Forest Park residents to request trees on parkways that have open plots. Up to 25 of those who reach out can choose a tree from Doty Nurseries in Maple Park — though it can’t be a maple tree.
While Forest Park’s inventory of 3,335 trees revealed there are 71 tree species in the village, around 51% of the trees are maple, a percentage that’s far too high to support local arbor biodiversity.
“I have been specifying, since we have an overabundance of maples, I’m laying off maples for a while,” Stella said.