 My name is Elise Shabler and I work with the Department of Forest Parks and Recreation and the Vermont Urban and Community Forestry Program. And in a world without Emerald Ashmore, my job is to work with municipalities on the management and care of public trees. So before EAB, I did a lot of tree inventory work and public policy development and management planning, all that jazz. And the past couple months, as you can imagine, I've been pretty much dominated by this small, green beetle. Also from, so just to kind of go over who's here, Danielle Fisco is my co-presenter. A lot of people know Danny. Program manager with the Urban and Community Forestry Program. They set him up earlier. I'm based out of Essex Junction. Want to say anything? Hi. And then Bonnie Wanniger is with the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission. And so we worked with Bonnie to coordinate this municipal training. Do you want to say anything, Bonnie? Just welcome and thank you for coming out. I know you'd rather be building snowman Emerald Ashmore just as good. Towards the end, I'd like to talk about our inventory and management plan assistance that we can provide. Great, so I'll give you the floor at the end of our talks. And I'm just going to throw this up right off the bat. These two websites, going to mention them a lot tonight. There is a table of swag in the back if you haven't already explored it. The main point of those items is so you walk out of here with something that has BT invasives on it and something that has BT Community Forestry on it. Those are our two sites. With everything you have in a packet that you have in front of you is on those websites. So just kind of the one stop shop for everything in all things EAB. To walk you through our intended agenda for the day, I am going to do a presentation on kind of the story of EAB. And for many of you, this is just going to be a refresher. But for some of you maybe you will learn something new. Danielle will talk about Vermont's response and all of the slowing, the spread recommendations. We'll then get into planning strategies and management strategies for municipalities. I'm going to ask John to come up and talk a little bit about Montpelier just so you get a sense for a town that really has gone through the full planning process and has a plan. We're going to break out after that into some small groups. Do a little activity in a group share and get you out of here by six. I've got questions at the end, but please just interrupt. This is definitely a dialogue. So as we go through, there's going to be a lot of information. Again, a lot of it might be old news to you. Some of it might be brand new. So if you want to ask questions, please just go ahead and do that. And I guess the overall goal of this presentation, this workshop is to get you to wrap your heads around what it looks like to manage Emerald Ashmore for a municipality. So when I'm talking about municipal trees, I'm talking about public trees. So these are the trees in the public right-of-way. These are the trees around your municipal buildings, your public parks, your cemeteries. If your town manages school properties, those trees as well. So we will talk a little bit about private property, touch on landowner issues. But for the most part, we are focused on that public realm tonight. So with that, I'm going to start. Actually, before we do that, I'd love to do just a very quick round. Name, town, and your role. Okay. All right. Steve Lott's speech from Waterbury. I'm the tree warden and also the community planner at the town. Brett Tobin, tight field on the road cushion. Okay. I'm on town forest committee and tree warden. Four. You smoked in there. I smoked in there. John Aguilache with the Montpelier Tree Board and also the Point Person for EAB. I'm Ginger Anderson, and I'm actually the district forest manager of Forest and Parks for this area, but I also am a resident of Berlin and have been asked to help with an inventory for Berlin. So I guess I'm wearing that hat. Fred Haun, I live in Berry City. I represent Conbridge County Forest Committee. Roland Payne, I'm from Cabin. I'm the tree warden and talent. I'm also a forest, past forest detective. Yes. If you're a first detector, let us know. John, you're also... I'm Otis Monroe, southern ones are regional planning. I usually do emergency management with them, but they send me to learn about this, but I don't have anyone who's done it, so... We're on our right plain field. I'm a landowner with adjusted trees. I'm Steve Long from Corinth and I'm on the select board. Virginia Barlow from Corinth and I'm a tree warden. Ken Bushie from Berkshire and the planning commission. Hank Landritz, Swanton, tree warden. Rich Starter from Williamson on that planning commission. First detector, that's the first detector in the solo tree service. I'm Audrey Sue, first year planning commission. I'm Joanne Darden, I live in Montpelier and I work with the urban community. Jen Baer, I work for the Jen and solidly I'm here because it's very possible that sadly, when the chips, when these trees get chipped up, we will be getting a lot of that for compost, so we're sort of keeping an eye on how this is going to get there. Elaine Lange, I'm a stumped manager for Berrytown and our holy warship pretend to be Sarah Hockmeyer, Montpelier tree board and my real job is a landscape designer too. I'm the director of the Montpelier County Forest and I live in Calis, and I'm here just to make sure I can help counts the system being prepared for dashboard when it hits. Neil Monteith, I work with Forest Health, Forest Parks, I work with the tree warden, the PH 100, we're planning a new system here soon. Excellent. So there are a lot of towns represented in here which is really exciting and not just from central Vermont, so great swath of participants. So I'm going to start with a quick story of Emerald Ashmore. Has anyone in here not heard? I don't know. You've got to ask. This is not a real Emerald Ashmore, this is our costume. If you ever want to borrow this FYI, it's available. We had one of our volunteers in Johnson made us a couple of these, so if you leave here with nothing else, know that you can borrow any costume. This is, in fact, the Emerald Ashmore, so it is a very beautiful pest actually. It's iridescent green. It is about the size of a penny, smaller than a penny, a very small pest. It hails from northern China, Mongolia, Japan originally. When it first came, when it was first discovered in the U.S., we knew nothing about it. No one really knew anything about this pest. So everything that we know now, all the information about EB is really based on the efforts of researchers and municipalities and the beds and the states in the past 20 years since it's been in the U.S. The way that EB kills ash trees, and it does kill 99.8% of ash trees that are untreated, is that it essentially cuts off its circulatory system. So the larva, in the larval stage, the pest eats the flume of the tree. So if you know anything about tree biology, the flume is the layer just under the bark, and that's where all of the nutrient and water exchange is happening within the tree. So it's not the adult beetle, it's not this version of the beetle that is actually doing the most damage. It's the larvae, it's the babies. And essentially as they feed, they create these galleries, these feeding galleries, and at low levels the tree can still function and it can recover, but within a few short years the populations bump up and you see basically the tree becomes girdled from these feeding galleries. So I'm going to pass around, I have a couple things to pass around, and these are, let me grab those guys. So we'll pass around, I have two sets of, save these, two sets of vials with adult and pupil stage EAB, so you can see how small they are and what they look like. And then these are just two examples of pieces of ash wood that have been impacted by the larvae. So you see that, those tunnels. We'll start with that one from the back maybe. EAB feeds on, as far as we know, all species of Native American ash. So all trees within the fraction is genus. That's about 16 different species across the United States, but in the northwest we have three major, northeast. In the northeast we have three major ash species, the green, the white and the black ash. So in Vermont those are the three we're really talking about that are going to be impacted and EAB will attack all three of them. There is another tree that is just worth mentioning that has been found to be a host for EAB and that's the white fringe tree which is a Chinaanthus. It's a small ornamental tree that we don't really find planted much in the landscape in Vermont. It's not hardy for most of our climate so it's more of an issue for like the mid-Atlantic states that's a tree species that's often planted as an ornamental in yards but just so you know there is one other host species that we know of and that's the fringe tree. To kind of walk through the life cycle of the beetle this is obviously again an enlarged view but the actual pest as you're all seeing really really tiny as in the adult stage in the summer, in the late summer the adult beetles after eating the leaves of the ash tree the females will lay their eggs in the little grooves in the ash bark and then the larvae when they hatch they will burrow right underneath the bark and they feed as they grow creating those galleries and the life cycle can be a one to two year overwintering phase so at low levels of infestation it actually will often take two full winters for the pupae to go through all of its larval stages but when the population levels are higher that shortens so it's a one to two year range once you have high population levels you're really seeing that one year overwintering. When the larvae is ready to come out of the tree it exits through a D-shaped hole which we have some examples of what that looks like and if you've been around long enough talking about EAB they say look for the D-shaped holes but as you'll see they're really really tiny about three millimeters across and they're not outlined in red and they're not outlined in red so they are they are really hard to detect compounded on that EAB will often start infesting at the top of the tree in the canopy and the reason we think that is is that the adults are eating the leaves in the canopy and when they mate and the female wants to go light her eggs she's just walking down the branch finding a place on the main stem to lay those eggs it's not until the population levels increase enough that there's not enough space or there's not enough food for the larvae up top that they'll start to migrate down the bowl of the trunk so once you're seeing those D-shaped holes at the base of the trunk at eye level it's likely that that tree has been infested for quite some time yeah, so that's kind of the life cycle it is the life cycle and we just thought we actually just added these slides to just do a really quick overview of some signs and symptoms because one of the things people are asking what can we do it's start looking out for these signs and symptoms we are in the infested area here in Berry and the cusp so I'm going to show a slide in a couple moments about the pattern we've seen with population levels over time so right now we know it's in the area but it's really hard to see it so things that you can be looking for the biggest indicator that's been really helpful and you can see this from the highway if you're training your eyes to it is this woodpecker flucking it's where essentially the woodpeckers are looking for the pupil stage or the larvae and they're also kind of flucking off with their feet the bark and it's not, remember where the larvae are right underneath the bark so this is not deep holes woodpecker holes this is just this kind of bonding effect where it looks like the bark has been dive blonde essentially because it's been flucked off just that top layer so the woodpecker flucking is a really good telltale sign that something's going on at least before you move on can you mention the other disease or conditions that mimics this to some extent because it's very common to have like the shading of the bark there's, compounding the issue of EAV is that ash in general have been declining in Vermont for quite some time and I might even ask Danny and Neil and Ginger if you guys know we know we have ash yellows which is a bacterial issue what's said Neil, do you know it's called the smooth bark bark it's very common on that there's all the trees there's also a clear wing ash borer I have a tree that has it and it looks just like that picture on the right and Emily about it one time and she told me that it's the same size but there's round exit holes and it looks exactly like that tree if you actually peeled the bark on that that you would not see those S shape galleries for that we get a lot of calls about that yeah this is all I was just out last week during the delineation survey of in Milton for the new find up in Grand Alley County and we drove all the roads in Milton in a day just scanning the road sides and there's just a lot of crappy looking ash but there were very few that had more than one of these signs that we felt we needed to flag so just to walk through them again the flucking right now obviously you can't see the canopy because the leaves are off but thinning in the canopy bark splitting so what pictures don't do that for other bugs? they do if there are certain bores that are more deep into the wood so you would see like a bigger hole that's going versus kind of more the surface level like scraping off of the bark bark splitting is something considered to be kind of an earlier sign it's the tree physiologically is trying to respond to the stress of the larvae and eating its cambulae letter so essentially we'll put out a response that in some cases can start to crack the bark and this is the situation where you might be even able to see those galleries without even needing to peel back the bark epichormic branching so these are sprouts that come off the trunk or off of branch bases this is essentially the tree stressed out trying to put out grain because it needs to photosynthesize to live and then there's those d-shape exit holes are something you'll see again either in the upper crown if you're early enough or down at the base once the infestation level has bumped up and the s-shaped gallery so I put this kind of blast because you won't see it unless you have an obvious bark split or if you peel back the bark so when we get people that press the report it button on vtinvasives.org which is how we're asking everyone to report any suspicious trees that email goes to a variety of partners somebody goes out if they see multiple of those other signs they might end up peeling back the bark on the tree to see if we you know the tree in Montpelier at the National Life Building which is where the Montpelier infestation was detected we went out and peeled one of the trees that looked like it very likely had eevee and we couldn't find anything and then then they ended up cutting the tree down and peeling some of the branches and the canopy and that's when they found the galleries so again just spot peeling you might not see anything because you don't know exactly where it is so when you're spot peeling is that all just dumped from the ground most cases yeah so basically you're talking about not testing that yeah I mean you can't do if you have a means to do branch sampling I know John will talk about this in Montpelier you can if you have a bucket truck at your disposal it's something you can do we certainly don't want to promote people just climbing trees that look brittle just to get a branch sample you know one of the lessons for me in this early phase in Vermont is it's so hard to detect early infestations it's just it really is and I just share that as like that tree in National Life I built by I worked there and I've never guessed you know and now you see it though like the other ones now you're looking I do but I still it's hard and it's hard but we had binoculars we peeled it early infestations are hard that's why it's it's we're not we're not finding big a lot of trees to look at right now so populations are higher so just to give an idea of you know how many trees we're talking about in Vermont we estimate that about five to seven percent of our native forests are white and green ash and black ash mostly white and green and that's about 160 million trees you know for the purposes of today we're talking more about these urban forests we have been for the past five or so years pretty engaged in doing street tree inventories with towns so many of you live in towns where we've done those inventories and that's really confined to just the village centers our downtowns and so these these numbers I'm throwing up there just thinking about that urban that downtown core the populated areas so you know Hyde Park we found four public ash trees that's not a big deal for them now that does not include the rural roads in Hyde Park but that's for their downtown very city got 15 Waterbury Village 3% I put Burlington up there just because they have a high number 12 1275 but that's still only 11 percent of their street tree population my pillar has about 450 and I don't know what that the total that is of the total but again John will talk more about what their approach is going to be and this is you know I just want to mention that for our communities we're kind of seeing that free the most towns that we've done inventories for it's under 20% of their total tree population which can seem like a lot but in the Midwest and in Colorado there are communities where 70% of their trees their public trees are green ash so it's a species that was planted really heavily after we lost our own trees and and it grows really well in urban areas it's a tree that grows fast it's very tolerant so I'm not to diminish the urgency of this issue and that EAB needs to be addressed but just to give some perspective I think we're the aesthetic and economic impact to some degree is less than what we've seen in the Midwest and in some of those western communities that rely on ash as much higher percentage of their public tree population these two at the bottom these are estimates of rural road populations so we did an estimate of 10 miles in Northfield and then Randolph did 10% of their roads and more of just a dot tally and then they extrapolated out and estimated how many trees those are certainly larger numbers that are a little bit more scary to look at 6000 trees on rural roads this does not go into the size of those trees so they could be all mostly 6 inches and smaller but just to kind of elucidate that the rural road side is an environment where we don't we have not historically engaged in management of that environment so much in our program and it's something we're really focused on right now but our understanding what is it going to look like when we lose ash what's the most efficient way to deal with the ash along our rural roads how do we support towns in managing those road sides that's the landscape that is my favorite ash tree in my neighborhood it's pretty this is that graph I mentioned earlier so this is just demonstrating kind of what we've seen from the experience of the Midwest states one of the benefits of being so linked to the game is that we are able to learn so much from what we've learned from the other states and their experiences so we're right here oh you can't do the red on the screen so weird we're right here we're at the cusp and the experience has been is that once EAB pops up in an area once it's detected in an area at about around year 8 or 8 to 10 is when you really see that population skyrocket and following that comes the death curve so 10 years after the initial find is when you'll really start seeing the mass die-offs of ash so this is important to understand one because it demonstrates that we have time right now this is the time in this area to be really diving into planning and to have a plan so that when this happens you know what your strategy is or you're starting on your strategy next year in anticipation of this happening so understanding that you have time this is the time to plan the other thing to understand is that the die-off happens in a pretty short amount of time so you can go from I was just listening to a webinar out of Ohio Ohio State and they were talking about how when EAB is first detected there's all this energy around it and then years go by and there's only a couple of trees that are dying here and there and here and there and then year 8, 9, 10 all of a sudden hundreds of trees are dying and everyone's kind of forgotten about it and it becomes an issue again so again just to make the case that there's a lot of energy around EAB right now so it's time to capitalize on that we have these years of low mortality I'm just curious when you're talking about making a plan are you talking about the plan to deal with the dead trees or the plan to try to I'm saying I know we're going to get to the plan are you talking about the plan to deal with the dead trees or the plan to try to save the trees both so the strategy what the strategies are and then make the case for you need to figure out where you want to fall on that strategizing I think your assessment is spot on for most towns unfortunately in our town playing field it's probably been around for about 4 or 5 years EAB yes so you think you're more here which is very likely the case I think the orange vine those trees it was estimated in the trees in Montpelier we know it was at least 2 years so yes that's a really good point for this group particularly some of you are in places where you probably are morally cured what happens to the EAB like year 12 why does it decrease so much it runs out of starts running out of food but I will say that the experience in the Midwest it's still persisting at low levels EAB will infest feed on trees 1 inch in diameter wow so if a tree can support 1 EAB it will feed on that tree the original thought was oh it will starve itself and we'll start seeing it leaving the landscape it's persisting at low levels that not to say that doesn't provide some the population levels go down dramatically and so there is now research around like is that a time to start introducing biocontrols that can maybe mitigate that population a little bit more and I just want to mention this idea of lingering ash so there are trees that are exhibiting some degree of tolerance or resistance to EAB and so there is there is this little spectrum most trees about 99% of them ash trees are susceptible and will die if not chemically treated but in the Midwest between 0.1 and 1% of trees are showing either some tolerance which means that it takes longer for the tree to succumb so it's responding in a way it's delaying death in some ways and then the very rare cases of trees that seem to be completely unfazed by EAB so this is the tree exhibiting some kind of physiological response where it's either killing the EAB in its larval state if it's you know or not even like right after the eggs hash not able even to penetrate the cambial layer and these are physiological responses that the native ash in EAB's native region they do the same thing so rare, few and far between but we have learned a lot from the Chestnut American Chestnut and from American Elm and there are crossbreeding programs that are already in place to really select those trees to crossbreed them so that we have the next generation of ash eventually but this is a case there is a case to be made if you own property you don't you know there can be a case to be made that you don't have to cut every tree down essentially so if there are not going to be a risk to public safety to property if we cut them all down we don't know what trees might have some resistance this is certainly not something we're promoting in the urban environment we can't just wait and see if those ones are going to tolerate or not but just worth putting in there there's a lot of research that's coming around these lingering ash and I'm going to pass it on to Danny this is to give Elisa Brick I think I had three slides and she gets back on so we're going to switch now to the spread of EAB from 2002 when it was first detected in Detroit till today and it was Detroit 2002 now 2018 we're in 35 states and 5 provinces so it's moved quite a bit those red dots are the first detection in counties but you can see what a huge growth of the spread of EAB over a short amount of time now we think probably it was in Detroit in the 90s but it wasn't found and identified until 2002 so I don't know if you mentioned this but naturally when it's in an adult phase and it's flying it goes only about 1 to 2 miles that's naturally its movement and it usually doesn't even go that far if it has ash trees to feed on close by but it can move that far so what's going on tell me how we get around people it's us we're moving EAB around that's really what's going on it's human movement and so we've tried to stop it and it just keeps moving around this is an example this is in Salem Mass and that's store right there that's a restaurant and it's a wood-fired place and they got wood delivered and an arborist a friend of ours working a lot with EAB so I'm going to check out this it's in a non-infested area a little closer now it could have been heat treated in Firewood but just to say that it's really easy to move around and Firewood seems to be the big culprit here and you have a dead tree in the backyard you don't know why it died 80 miles an hour down the road and to new places pretty quickly so this is sort of the story of EAB in Vermont we found it first in February this year in Orange since then seems to be like we've been looking for years we had this we kept saying like why aren't we finding it we've been looking for so long maybe we have lazy woodpeckers we kept saying but this year was the year so first found in Orange and now this is the spread there and then you have all these other confirmed areas and high risk so what this map is showcasing is what we're calling infested areas so the red areas are what we're calling the confirmed infested areas and then the yellow area is what we're calling the high risk area so the way that's defined is we know we have a tree or a set of trees or a site or we find a beetle on a purple track we know we have a hotspot then we draw 5 miles around that because based on what we've learned that we know is probably 5 miles from that area then we draw another 5 miles from that boundary and call that the high risk area because that's the area where it's it's at high risk so it's a 10 mile buffer around a known infested tree or where we found a beetle that makes sense so when we first found it in Vermont we were trying to decide what the approach would be how we managed EAB in the state and we had a collaboration of partners that we're working very closely with agency of AG, FPR the Forest Service provides a lot of guidance AFIS is where the quarantine comes from and UVM Extension of course is a partner in education and outreach so we needed to make a decision in Vermont how we wanted to handle the movement of wood and it was determined that we would go with the federal quarantine which means it would be statewide and that we would link up with the other states that are under the federal quarantine so we you can move wood anywhere within the federal quarantine which is a pretty big area we have a map of that actually I think I may yeah this blue zone here and actually New Hampshire is going to be full on in the federal quarantine probably coming out in December map so you can move wood without having a permit and all the areas outlined in blue we also knew that AFIS was talking about deregulating EAB and it's reality is they've been trying to regulate it since 2002 18 years later and look at the spread and it hasn't been very successful so our approach was let's do an education outreach to slow the spread and use those infested areas as the area where we want to really slow the spread we're considering those infested areas as trees that are potentially or infested with EAB and we don't want trees that are not treated leaving the site so this is what it looks like the movement of wood applies to the infested area we have recommended practices by product whether it's firewood whether it's chips logs and we also the recommendations go from the whether it's seasonal flight season or the non-flight season so the real risk is when Elise was talking about the life cycle of EAB in the wood when the larva is in the wood it's not as risky to move it because it's contained in the wood but when it's flight time when they hatch out that's when it's risky to move the wood because you could move it and they think the country of New Hampshire may have been firewood moving and it came out of the back of the pickup truck it could fly out and just infest a tree from there I don't think I said the flight season and the reality is that's the federal quarantine flight season we think actually in Vermont it's more like mid June to early September and it's based on the growing degree days and so that's it's a little bit smaller window but we're still going with the May one to September 30th there is one thing that you should be aware of that we are not under a state like a county quarantine or in a federal quarantine and wood can move throughout Vermont there is a law on the books that agriculture oversees that says you cannot move a plant pest and ad can enforce that now they're saying if you are following the slowest spread recommendations no problem if you are intentionally moving infested wood you can see the galleries you know you have EAP and you're not following the recommendations you're moving infested firewood during the summer months they can do something about it they haven't said what they would do but they can enforce that law so the take away from slowest spread is to keep it local wood can move within that infested area there are going to be thinking about moving wood out of the infested area if you would want timing matters you can do a lot more in the winter time and you can do during the flight season and for municipalities and working with arborists and utilities chipping and grinding is considered a treatment so that is considered that there's no little risk if it's been chipped or it was ground that you can still have live EAP after that at least it's going to go into some other utilization options how to use wood locally but this is sort of the slow spread recommendations of trying not to move infested wood out of the infested area and spread it I think that was my last one and you all have the four slow spread recommendations sheets in your packet so those are that we'll give more information on everything that you just talked about so moving into municipal planning planning for EAP the kind of three points I want to start with are that one, ash trees play an important role as street and park trees in many communities in Vermont along rural roads in many communities in Vermont and in our public forested land like our town forests understanding that and appreciating that fact upfront that it's a valuable tree in the landscape when we lose it from the landscape there will be a gap and that the idea that we should just go and cut all of our ash trees down is not something I'm personally comfortable saying that we should do the second point is that municipalities have a duty of care to ensure public safety so that's that is true so trees along the right of way that could fall and harm someone or property those need to be managed so municipalities need to manage the impacts of EAP you have to do something and then the third piece which I know is very unpopular is that municipalities for the most part will bear the responsibility and the costs for that management coming in and paying for the removal of all of your trees this pest is widely considered to be a slow moving natural disaster that is the most expensive forest pests in the history of our country and largely most of those costs are being borne by municipalities and private landowners I really like this quote that I just there's a couple of examples of EAP plans and I just read one yesterday from Onadaga County, New York Onadaga Onadaga Syracuse from Syracuse they have a pretty comprehensive plan that I think is worth a read through if you're interested in a variety of formats of plans but I just like this quote they said the management of ash trees should adhere to two goals one is to maintain safety and to retain some of the ecological and social benefits that ash trees provide that's a terrible photo that I put that up there it's so grainy so as far as management strategies for our municipality what I'm going to present is basically a spectrum so very much understanding that every town is going to have a different EAB and that we can't prescribe one method that you're going to be able to deal with this pest there are so many variables the first and foremost being vulnerability to EAB so if you're a town that has a lot of ash in your right of ways in your public spaces you are much more vulnerable and are going to be impacted much more than a town that has not a lot of ash to deal with so that's one variable second is existing budget for tree care, for tree removals I know that a lot of towns have zero dollars in their budgets for tree and I know that a lot of towns tree care or tree is just circle or like wrapped in public works general public works or roads crew budget every year so another variable might be the public will but are people in town that are passionate about saving some of these trees are they passionate about making sure that there's an inventory is there someone that's willing to take charge and write a plan and make sure that this left board knows about this issue is there a public will to treat some trees which we'll talk about or is the public perception of chemical treatment of trees in your town is not favorable and that's something that you want to engage in so these are just some examples of the variables that we just can't say this is what you should do we can consider all of these things in the planning process on one end of the spectrum so these three kind of photos are just what they're showing in Burlington they're starting to do some inter-planting so they have some neighborhoods highly, pretty much monoculture, ash green ash so they're not taking any of those trees down right now what they're doing is finding gaps and they're planting new trees in between so that when EAB comes through they lose those trees there's something to take over this is a photo of systemic trunk injection which I will talk about that is a strategy for management for EAB and then this is a photo for sure along the road where nothing was being done and these trees, these ash trees are all dead along the road so that photo on the right is we've been doing inventory in our town and so here you've got a power line on one side and not on the other side and so we've been inventorying the ones that are not on the side of the power line assuming that the utilities are going to be dealing with that but I just want to sure, I have a slide about utilities but just addressing that now we met with all of our electric utilities in May and they're all very aware of this they all have plans either in development or in place dealing with 11,000 miles of road and they will be focusing on the areas that are confirmed so will not be, they would like to be ahead of the past but they will be responding to areas where it is and they will manage within the utility right of way I had originally been talking with towns and saying you don't have to inventory both sides if the utility is going to take care of that utility and are meeting in Erlington if I say a few things too because reality is the municipality and utility both have the right to manage in that right of way the utility may be behind your desire that's just the reality because they have a lot to handle and they are usually on a rotation in five years sometimes even a little bit longer and so they may have been there two years ago, there were no signs maybe another two years down the road these trees are dead they're not always able to come back right away so many utilities aren't planning but they haven't shared with us what their plan is yet and I've asked them I even, I put a call out to them this week but of course they're a little busy this week what do you want me to be telling what do you want us to be telling communities and that they also have a big financial pressure on them to deal with this and they're also considering they prefer to remove them preemptively because they have an issue with contractors who do not want to climb trees that are infested with EAB and the way that we've heard that trees fail in the removal that it's three times as more to remove a dead tree so they'd like to be ahead of it I don't know if they're always going to be ahead of it but you can actually, if you want to be more proactive and remove the risk you can also manage those trees in the reddit what I will say is that make sure you have people that have the right certification to do it because anytime you're within ten feet of an utility line you need to have certain certifications because it is dangerous that's why it'd be ideal if utility companies come in with their professional contractors that they bring in now we're talking the bigger GMP, Washington Electric Vermont Electric Co-op Velco, some of the small municipalities have municipal utility companies we've not engaged with I did go to the emergency management meeting where we had an emergency preparedness planning session with most utilities so they are aware of it but I think they're very much in a planning phase and trying to get the resources they're going to need how are utility right-of-ways determined? Is there a fixed width or does it vary? I think it varies I mean I think the size of the lines and it's I wonder if we can get that for you though Bonnie, do you know if we can get utility right-of-way with based on the size of the line it might not be exact I'm going to take that back because that would be really helpful the right-of-way often varies in what they're actually controlling now too sometimes they're managing a narrower portion than they actually have and I wonder if they'll go out and remove danger trees too sometimes they'll do that we've heard from other states that trees weren't very active at all but they pay for it down the road and reliable power they're going to get a lot of calls and so they're going to want to mitigate it and we're also in a heavily the Midwest wasn't heavily ash-dominated like we're dealing with here the borough roads were there any examples in the Midwest of any partnerships between municipalities and utilities to maybe be a little more proactive from both sides are there any examples of that well we did bring National Grid in from New York because they are being very proactive and they are working with municipalities mostly to raise awareness and maybe when they're in that community talking about it but right now what I'm hearing from like G&P and stuff we can't handle all the calls that are coming in we're working on it and our message will let you know what it is so they're not going to be able to respond when you say that trees down come do it, we're ready they're planning 11,000 miles of line and trying to put it into the rotation and they're really being really trying to help slow the spread too they're on board with that well my question was a follow up to that really power accepted power companies might be to what are the calls especially from towns that know they're infested is there hope that you call them and bug them and ask for faster action we asked we asked if they wanted towns to share their inventory data for example and they said no not right now and they're doing G&P to do an inventory and they estimate that there's about 10,000 people that are going to crash along their lines but they're updating that inventory to be more realistic now that they realize that they're going to have to really manage these and I think that some towns that point people point the company to the roads with higher ash but it's certainly not uniform right we're trying to make that dialogue right now they're in very similar situations to you they have to get a budget they got to do a plan they got to get a budget so they're they may have to go to the public utilities commission they may have it's they know for them it's going to be huge financial pressure and when resources are going to come in I wish I could say more this isn't a question it's just an observation which is that it seems to me that there's more along roads and right of ways I mean it's an intermediate and compared to in the forest yeah it's huge our 5% estimate might be really low compared to the forested yeah and that's why it came out with 10% yeah that's a very good point alright so just to kind of give you the book ends in the middle of that spectrum that I mentioned about management is that on the one end you know one strategy is to be highly proactive so this would entail preemptively removing trees before EB arrives and I'm not condoning that I'm just saying this is a strategy that some municipalities have taken across the 35 states replacing trees starting off the bat essentially doing some insecticide treatments high value trees that they want to save with a really high upfront cost so being way ahead you know figuring out your budget going ahead and start mitigating the issue before it's an issue so this might be appropriate for towns with high budget not the reality but also might be appropriate in places that have a really low risk threshold that don't want to be grappling with decisions about where to prioritize once trees start dying in the middle there's this whole swath of space that we're calling the selective management spectrum so picking strategies based on your desired time frame that you want to maybe the goal here is really to spread cost out over time so picking strategies based on a time frame in the target areas so knowing where your ash concentrations are knowing how you want to prioritize and some of the strategies in here include a lot of monitoring and I'm going to talk about slowing ash mortality which is the cool acronym SLAM slow ash mortality so you're monitoring your population you're understanding where you are on that curve of population you might be starting to do some removals of dead and poor and only fair ash trees now understanding that you'll be removing trees over a chunk of time number of years maybe you're doing replacements, maybe you're doing interplanting like Burlington maybe you're doing some insecticide treatment of high value trees maybe you're doing insecticide treatment of trees just as a gap stop to delay the death of those trees for a couple years knowing that you will not continue those treatments over time but to kind of slow down that death curve you're being strategic about your zones about where you're putting your energy and again that the real goal here is to spread cost out over time and I think this is where most of our communities that are doing planning in Vermont for EAB are going to be falling somewhere in here hopefully the third on the other end that spectrum is what we're calling reactive or delayed management and this is people have called it the do nothing approach but it's really not do nothing because you will have to do something but in this case you're really just kind of letting maybe you know where all your ash trees are but you're really just kind of letting them die and then dealing with them as they die it's just important to take back to your slept words when you're talking about this is that the do nothing delayed reactive approach is very likely the most expensive approach in the long run as Danny mentioned the tree ash once they die from EAB they they do not die with dignity they fall apart really fast they snap at the base the large tree care companies that you might contract to do removals will not climb trees in areas where we know EAB is if a certain amount of the canopy is gone they will not climb trees in the winter they need to bring their cranes in it can be up to three times more expensive to remove trees that are dying and dead from EAB then if you catch it earlier and remove the trees when they're still alive it's also much more dangerous and kind of my fear here but for a lot of towns the default is just to say oh, our road crew will just deal with these trees as they as they die and again they break apart and they fall apart a lot differently than other trees whereas you have an elm tree that dies from Dutch Elm can stand for a number of years on the roadside and be structurally pretty okay within a couple years the ash will start to break apart so that being said we have actually put in a proposal a grant proposal to develop hopefully we get it to develop a game of logging training for road crews for municipal road crews so that we're able to communicate this and to help towns understand how to safely deal with these trees along the rural roadside as they are declining and once they're invested so along the lines of making the argument you said that it can cost up to three times more to remove a dead tree is that a dead and thermal ashboard tree or if so can you compare that to a different kind of dead tree what we're hearing is when they fall they shatter so there's just a lot more cleanup involved and because they are so brittle your typical techniques that you do to remove your time them your rigging techniques that take it down they fall under their own weight so it is much more labor intensive and you have to use equipment to get in there so they are finding yeevee infested trees are more expensive to take down especially if you think about real urban areas are you asking like would you be able to look at a tree a dead tree and say that died from yeevee versus some of the conversations I'm hearing on our town is dead trees now and we just deal with them when they die so if say like Dutch Elm which I think some more staff probably might have seen but anyway if that's like a twice as expensive that sort of thing I would compare it to taking the rigging pieces so you can't sometimes on there I have some budget numbers I don't have specifics about dead tree costing other than the three times but I do have a slide with some budget numbers that we'll get to in just a couple minutes just to make sure I got the right question yes so it costs three times as much to take down a dead animal or ash after it's dead compared to when it's alive yes and what is it cost to take down a dead elm tree after it's dead compared to when an elm tree is alive right Ricky was so we've done a lot of our first over the years and they look at it before ash borer as dead or living and it's pretty easy to look at a dead tree and tell ya that's a lot that we don't know what's going on living trees can assess that a little more easily so a dead tree right off the bat is going to cost more there's a lot more work involved a lot more equipment so easily two times more than a living tree throwing ash borer is even more complex and I think a big part of that is again in the cleanup because when you cut a limb off and drop it to the ground with an elm or something you can pick it up throw it in the chipper with the ash where we're hearing is the limb comes down hits the ground and shatters so you're spending a lot more time whoever's doing that work is spending a lot more time actually gathering up all the pieces and sticking them into the chipper and this is a generalization it's not a story yet that's just a reality we don't know how it's going to really play out here this is what we're hearing from experiences in other states and also when you're removing depends on if there's infrastructure in the way if you can just drop it or you have to take it down because you have a house or it's a target there that you want to make sure that it doesn't hit so there's a lot that plays into removal is it I do have estimates of general costs from talking to Arborist that I'll get to in just a minute some of this has to do with the grain pattern it's one of those trees which is telling me it just about splits itself so for firewood it's great or what we're talking about with safety of moving and it's just because it's cutting off the moisture that's where it's getting so brittle I wanted to just Paul in the ash it's a it is a readily splitting wood and generally when we look at trees you know you can tell how fast the tree is rotting by how fast the twigs drop off and you can tell after a year or two years or three years or whatever something like Elm is a very tough stringy wood with interlocked grain and stuff like that so they can stand for quite a while you know and you still can fell them and hold together and so it's very much a factor of the species of wood and your experience with them so something like dealing with game of logging is well worth it because that's all about you know knowing your species and experience with them with what happens with trees that have certain growth patterns which affect all of this well hopefully we'll get that funding big bucks from the Forest Service so just wanted to mention I just added this slide today and you might want to talk about it this slam slow ash mortality it's a technique or an approach that you can take to try to monitor and limit the population boom of EAB once you have an infestation so there's just a couple strategies like establishing these trap trees or actually I heard the other day I'm referred to as sentinel trees so you're essentially sacrificing a tree by girdling it which stresses the tree out and it tracks the EAB it's easier food for them they'll come flocking they get inside of the tree and then you harvest the tree over the winter when the larvae are inside and then you peel the bark to monitor and then you get rid of the wood and kill all the EAB so that is establishing trap trees it's something that we've heard a lot of interest in recent weeks the people on their own property and other municipalities are interested in establishing this is something that forest pest detectors might be called upon to do or might want to coordinate can you say you kill the EAB what's the method of killing it oh you burn the wood, chip the wood yeah you can get rid of them girdling techniques suggest that EAB is a secondary insect attacking stressed trees they are more attracted to stressed trees the healthy forest and municipal you're talking about municipal yes well you might establish this on you know we had a landowner in Arlington on his in his wildlife they love healthy trees too they are attracted to the pheromone of the stress so it's they're not just going after stressed trees but they will be attracted to that Jordan and I've also read that where the emerald ashore is native the tree it doesn't have stressed trees in general and the healthy trees have a resistance where it's here where the insect is not needed none of our trees have a resistance so there's not as large a difference between an attacking a healthy or a stressed tree I mean in my experience I have a stand of about five trees and two of them are now completely dead and strangely the most stressed tree seems unaffected it's weird I have no answer it's strange some trees that seem also are healthy and unaffected well this is a strategy that has been implemented and you know I don't know I don't have a number of how effective it has been but I think another piece of this is being able to kind of monitor where your population level is so doing the peeling understanding okay we trapped this tree we found X amount of EAB we know it's more than last year so or more than three years ago so understanding where your population level is another another strategy within SLAM is kind of selectively harvesting larger diameter trees in an area so that you're essentially removing some percentage of the available flume and then utilizing that wood so building something out of it that's yeah hydrating hydrating sure so there are some papers about this if you're more interested in learning about SLAM I just wanted to mention it in any kind of strategy management strategy you're going to take the very first and most important piece to start with is understanding your vulnerability so that means having some kind of an inventory of your public ash trees so I always say you can't manage but you don't know you have so you could find like Berry City you have 15 total ash trees to deal with and then it's really not going to be within the public realm that big of a deal for your community or you could find like Randolph that you have estimated 6000 trees along your back roads so getting that inventory and having some type of survey is a great first step and it's a great way to get people energized and engaged in EEV planning at the local level give people something to do go count ash trees and we can really help you start we have three we have a website that's dedicated to ash inventory and we have three we're calling tiers of inventory so the first is really the lowest commitment level like the if you have very low capacity to do inventory we have a couple of examples of tally sheets so this would and kind of a protocol to follow if you want to do like a driving ash rural road ash tally you could pick 10% of your roads you could pick the 10 miles of the most heavily trafficked roads in town just getting a general sense of how many trees in each size class you're seeing along your road so then you can estimate what your total vulnerability is the second tier is a new tool it's called the rural roadside ash inventory tool and I'm not going to spend too much time talking about it other than to say we have a couple communities that we've trained and are using the tool now it uses an ArcGIS Collector app called ArcGIS Esri app called Collector which you download and use on a smart device that has high GPS capacity so I've had errors we have 12 of them we can loan them to towns to use to collect inventory data you're essentially stopping at either every tree or maybe some designated protocol like every half mile or whatever and you're plotting a feature that's telling you how many trees are within ash trees are within that area so it's either single tree or hey we went we're stopping every half mile and just counting the number of trees within a half mile or plotting them so we have a protocol for this we have a couple of videos on our website that just kind of walk you through what it looks like to use so if you're interested in exploring what that looks like the idea with this is that that you can just use it you don't have to hire us to come I can do a training and then get you set up to be able to go out and collect the data on your own and then the third tier is our street tree inventory tool so that's really appropriate for like more populated if you want to stop and look at every single tree spend five minutes at each tree looking at all different kinds of if it has signs of symptoms whatsoever so not really appropriate for rural roadsides but if you have the more downspot areas that's the tier three high most work involved and we don't moonlight so we can't hire us but you can't you can't hire us you can't hire us we have utilities so I'm going to skip this slide but again just reiterating what Danny's hearing yeah I think the last piece that we heard from utilities and this may happen when with road crews took to leaving the wood in our efforts to slow the spread and not move potentially infested wood from the infested area outside we are hearing from utilities they like to leave the wood on site for the landowner and that a lot of times they leave wood fairies that come and move the wood so we've talked to them put signage up what they can do to just minimize that movement first in our efforts to slow spread that's the wood fairies that is the only PG version or G version of wood fairies can you just talk about the protocol where wood can be moved within the quarantine area and yet you're saying it can't be moved I don't understand moving out from the infested area people could pick it up and move it to outside the infested area so you have a trunk on the ground they cut it up for firewood and they're going to drive 20 miles away and that's going to be outside the infested area that's not allowed it's not recommended well it's not recommended there is no enforcement but the quarantine is saying there are certain things that can happen within that quarantine the federal quarantine and our entire state is within the federal quarantine so you can move anything around the entire state of Vermont and still be within the quarantine there were signs however I thought I saw signs that said don't move fire and that was our effort to slow the spread but that's you're saying it's not enforceable it's our recommendations there are we're not so slow the slow spread recommendation or slam part of the slam is to keep it local so I have a question I want to go back to your wood fairies we call them wood weasels but again my understanding is that municipalities when they cut a tree in the right way they do leave it for the landowner because that tree belongs to the landowner so what kind of responsibility what kind of outreach are you giving to landowners saying hey when the town comes and cuts a tree and leaves it in your ditch it's your tree some people don't like the wood fairies to take it away consideration in your planning effort how you plan on dealing with that it doesn't seem like if they're going to use it we've heard from some communities when they're thinking back they are removing astries that they're going to take it to a place and cut it up for firewood and give it out to residents and can they do that that's my question are they required to leave it for the landowner my understanding is that the leaving it for the landowner is by and large a courtesy in urban downtowns they certainly cannot leave the wood so I'm not aware of a statutory any kind of policy that says you must leave the wood it's a PR the municipality has the management rights but the reality is the landowner owns the tree that's why I guess a little it's a little murky but if you make your public awareness out this is how we're going to handle it as a select man I have no interest in in processing that wood I want it on the ground we're talking about preemptively cutting dangerous roadside ash I want it on the ground if it's not infested I have no problem with anybody taking it anywhere and right now you're out of the infested if it's not now it's not a risk if it's not infested it's not a risk and then you could have PR in your community that says come take the wood and use it in your home we don't want it leaving the area if you're in Ginny? I always thought that it wasn't a courtesy that the town but the wood belongs to the landowner I think it's deceptatory I don't know but that's a great thing for us to go back to yeah because I know they have the magic right but they own the wood and I think it's more you have a dialogue there's also a standard of practice that happens in communities it's certainly not in the tree warden statutes that is not something that's laid out in the tree warden statutes probably know the answer to that yes we will take that back they own it what's happening and I think a lot of times they just get removed and sometimes they leave it because it's easier and they know the landowner wants it are there situations presently where wood like that is actually being utilized in schools or municipal buildings as chipped wood because one of these buildings are being needed because we have a wood chip plant that needs a school in town and we had exactly the same questions if it was legal to chip and take it there or if it's the landowners we also talked about the tree fairies coming taking the wood on the ground and taking it outside the area not being a big risk it's certainly worth the dialogue because depending on what the size of the chips the difference are for the system and how they receive their chips so I think it would be a good dialogue to have whether there could be a partnership in this I know the trees we took down at national life that used in national life but then when we were in Bennington Bennington college uses chips and he was talking about they have to be very specific and no one has locally has that we're not going to take the wood somewhere else chip it and come back do they have the capacity to grind it I think there's it could be a great like the composting we may find opportunities that arise locally that um well you have to make the opportunity you probably have to happen is that you have to get with the people who are doing the chipping and say listen what needs to happen so that we can deal with this problem and if we have to make a deal with you to have the right equipment so that this can work and you can make chips when you're within a certain radius of this town and if these chips here or get them to the state of Vermont facility in Montpelier or whatever these places are spread all over the state we just need to make things happen so that one hand washes the other otherwise this whole problem is going to vary you know this we're responding as well we've been planning for a long time but the planning was mostly in detection and now we're trying to figure out as well I had a meeting this week with the with composters association of composters of Vermont and we've done a survey of which facilities will actually take the chips because they need carbon so eventually I think probably in a new year you'll be able to access a list of where chips can go but it's going to need to be some will chip some need to take chips to and we're also working with for Chittin solid waste we are also working with DEC and identifying which facilities will accept wood and treat them according to our slow to spread recommendations so we are working on that from our end there's probably a lot of local opportunities I would expect as well what's the status of towns working on their own either town specific or regional disposal area like hash disposal area it's certainly part of our planning worksheet it's something to think about has anyone tried it or started you can ask the group here from the plans that I've read there are recommended places in town here are some ideas about where we might have a disposal yard but we're again at a place where a lot of these plans have just been accepted or being reviewed by club boards and haven't haven't necessarily been accepted so I don't know of any towns that have established yard yes signs up about like well taking refer would you know there may be a conversation about how to have a general longway sign you're also taking it could be a resource how do you do just as you move into the management operating them there's a big assumption that you'll just dump all the greed and dump dump which may shorten it so take care do you have something right I'm just curious as to whether or not I saw what other towns have been doing how are they disposing of these troops is there a kind of good analysis of that what's worked with that we you know we we're trying to get as much information as we can and it's interesting when we talk to other states like it's like oh we've dealt with this already and they are obviously finding that disposal sites aren't as big of a deal as they were when they thought they were going to be that the wood seems to be getting managed that the harvest taking it down or chipping it or it doesn't seem to be as big of a need to say expected it to be I think some of the more urban areas are doing utilization projects that are maybe more less scaled up so actually making furniture out of the wood or like putting flooring in or handling for a new library or building benches that are coming out of another opportunity and a lot of you know we're talking about these disposal sites because we're trying to slow the spread you know and I think in some of those other areas in the Midwest they may have already been like it's here that they're not as much as concerned about slowing the spread as we are now at this point so moving moving along to budgeting so I have some very rough estimates and I've been working quite a while on a spreadsheet that's going to be on our website that has this information and some caveats to this information I've been calling local arborists that are reputable in Vermont some of this information is based on other states this figure the $18.33 per diameter inch for removal is from the forest service an estimate actually this should come down I have talked to some some towns have gotten quotes that are as low as 150 per tree for removal it depends on the size of the trees depends on if they're clustered in one neighborhood or if they're kind of scattered all over depends on other infrastructure there's a lot of variables here but between $150 and $3,500 to remove a tree I think that $3,500 again is trees in hard places that are big stump grinding is something if you're going to do replacement where the tree was planted this is again probably not applicable to our rural roadsides I don't expect there'll be a lot of replacement trees planted but in your villages in your downtown's public spaces some grinding allows you to be able to put a tree back in the ground it's not necessary to you don't have to do stump grinding but you know $125 to $250 tree for replacements depending on if you have volunteers during the plantings if you're growing them in your own nursery like anywhere from $100 to $600 if you're having someone come in and do those tree plantings and then insecticide treatment we can talk about this at length probably but the range I'm comfortable giving is between $3 and $12 per diameter inch so if a 10 inch diameter ash tree it would be around 120 inch dollars to treat that tree the lower end of this is if you have someone on your town staff that is a certified pesticide applicator who could do that application themselves versus hiring an arborist to do the insecticide application we all have a sheet in your packet that is our recommend the products that the state of Vermont is recommending if you do decide to go with an insecticide treatment there are two products amamectin benzoate and azadaractin these are both in the non neonicotinoid class of pesticides which means they are the non pollinator impacting there are many other products out there there are products that homeowners can buy on Amazon for EAB we do not want that happening I don't want that happening in Vermont I think it is really clear with your residents having information available talking with local arborist companies having information up on your website these are reputable people that can do insecticide treatment if you would like to do that I really recommend that we have heard from other states that predatory companies may come in to Vermont and prey on the fear of particularly insects and tell them they need to have all their trees treated and charge them astronomical prices so having this information up on our website and having some vetted companies coming from your local you guys your local conservation commissioner from your town I think makes a lot of sense we already had a resident Charlotte that paid $1400 to have three box elder trees treated and it will happen here unfortunately so doing what we can do to make sure we are putting out the right information the two treatments that we are recommending are both systemic trunk injections which means that they are injected directly into the base of the trunk of the tree in the springtime they both are treatments that would happen every other year in perpetuity so will have to happen at least for 20 years all the experience that we have in the Midwest we've only got 20 years of experience you may be able to stretch it out when the population drops to 3 years but that being said they are very effective for high value trees in good condition if those trees are providing benefit if they have historic value by your town, your community it can be as economical to treat those trees as it would be to remove and replace them so it's just important to recognize that it's not always just going to be cheaper to just remove everything you could actually find that it's over the long term provided you're understanding the benefits that those trees are providing back to your community and we do have on our website a frequently asked question about the side effects of the pesticides because there's a lot of questions of what will happen to the woodpecker and what happens to the pollinator and there's an excellent frequently asked question that goes through that for the pesticides that we're recommending and I recommend if you are going to you should be aware of those potential side effects and just sharing that it's out there and it's really good advice if charlotte is an example of a town they have a lot of large ash on private property their tree warden has put out an open call for anyone in town that's interested in having their trees treated they're going to put in a bulk order with one vendor so they'll get a guaranteed price and you know it's being applied by someone who's again reputable and vetted by the community so that's just an example of something that's happening sometimes you need to treat some trees sometimes won't be treating any trees again there's so many variables John can talk a little bit about your strategy burlington is not going to treat any of their 1200 trees and that's mostly because they're so spread out throughout the whole city they can't afford to treat them all and they don't want to be in a position where they're saying I value this neighborhood's ash trees more than I'm valuing this neighborhood's ash trees they are the city of arborism burlington has talked with homeowner associations so that's another strategy if you have street trees that are green ash and the green belt talking with the homeowners if they want to pay for the treatment the city could coordinate the treatment of those trees there's a tool called the eab cost calculator that once you start wrapping your head around budgets for every population it's kind of a cool plug and play you can put in the number of trees you have of different size classes and you can say I want to spread costs out over 10 years or 5 years you can put in specific numbers about the costs you know you're expecting and run it and it'll run different scenarios based on different management approaches so something to look out for or try out and on this last little piece considering when it's a good time to ask for funding we're coming up on budget season right now so is your citizenry aware of eab is this a topic that might get public support this year are you going to wait a year to ask for money I know middlebury has been putting aside about 5000 for the past three years into a reserve fund for eab we're not doing any preemptive tree removals but they're going to have that money available when they need to start doing that so maybe that's something to just ask for a small chunk for a reserve fund right now or if you're planning on doing preemptive removals along rural roads next year maybe this is the time to really ask for some funding we already talked about with disposal and utilization so I'm going to skip this because we're running out of time just a little note on public policies this might be a good time to just look through your town ordinances and policies do you have anything on the books that pertains to public trees do you have a tree policy or tree ordinance if you don't you default to the Vermont tree warden statutes we have a whole public policy page on our website those tree warden statutes are up there there is a section of tree warden statutes that pertains to infestations that essentially says that if a tree is known to be infested and if the commissioner of our agriculture department it used to be called the department of agriculture or something deans infestation control measure then the tree warden can actually require that both public and private trees are treated or controlled but it says that the municipality is okay for that so if you don't have anything more specific on the books in your town it might be just a time to think about developing some kind of policy around tree care and private property considerations along that line what information do you want your town to be providing for its homeowners and its landowners both residential property owners and commercials if you have institutions, local businesses that have ash trees on their property what's the information how do you want those people to be engaged are you going to provide any support for landowners and this is again something John did mention what Montpelier might consider doing anything on private property we already talked about ash failing differently so the risk of working trees killed by EB they're not the trees you think they are and we'll be interested to see in Vermont with our winter storms, ice loads snow loads that could compound when I was driving here today I was like ugh this was a type of storm and I'm going to ask John to come up for just a couple minutes about Montpelier's approach he's been extremely engaged in EBD planning for ever I've got a sheet that keeps me on track here so I don't talk too long because as Elise mentioned we have been dealing with planning for the Emerald Ash Forest since 2013 we wrote a preparedness plan which included steps to take before the bug got here and then steps to take after the bug arrived and using that as a basis we wrote a management plan to deal with the bug now that it's here and our point in the plan is that we can't stop EB our goal is just to slow it down in Montpelier that's all we can try to do so we're using the selective management rather than the delayed or non-management approach and so how are we going to try to slow it down well it comes down to survey resurvey survey some more basically what we've done is we've gone out and identified all the right-of-way ash trees in the city and we did that with the help of volunteers and the tree board and so we identified 450 trees that were in the right-of-way we did a survey back in 2013 where we identified 550 trees along those streets but we never tried to delineate exactly which ones were in the right-of-way so we included some that were probably on private property so this is a better estimate for what the municipality is responsible for the plan here then would be to spread the costs out over time you'd remove 10% of those ash trees over each year as they become infested some years you may initially years you may not remove the 45 trees which would be the 10% you may remove fewer because we don't have the infestation and then later on you may have to remove more than the 45 but our other goal is to monitor where the bug is so we're going to be deploying some of these green prism traps you've seen the purple prism traps apparently we learned that the green prism traps may work a little bit better and they have a pheromone that you put with them and it attracts the males apparently so if you deploy them in areas that are suspected infestations you can get a handle on whether or not the bug is in that area if detected we would then utilize some of the trap tree techniques to capture the bugs in that area at least and slow them down from spreading further the other concept that wasn't mentioned but is something we're thinking about is the concept of a lethal trap tree where you actually you create a trap tree but you also inject it with the insecticide so that the bugs are attracted to it and then they're going to perish and that tree may last a couple of years longer than your regular trap tree because you need to remove the trap tree once it's infested prior to the adults exiting the next year so that's a mandatory thing you'll have to remove that tree whereas with a lethal trap tree it wouldn't necessarily be mandatory to remove that tree you can take a look at it you can monitor it and then remove it before it becomes hazardous yeah so the process it would be to inject those trees with the point girdle right or maybe a year in advance well I would say you could you could inject them let that insecticide the systemic insecticide spread and then and then girdle so you'll have to give it a chance to get through roots to canopy we haven't done it's a concept in our plan okay I'll get to where we are with our plan in a second too the other thing we would we have already done at least the people in the parks department have done some branch sampling of suspect trees looking for evidence of EAB and we haven't found any to date so they may have looked at about a dozen trees that we identified during our survey that were suspect trees but we haven't definitively found the bug in those areas okay so we're also incorporating the protection aspect we have 15 green ash trees downtown some of the largest trees downtown are ash tree green ash trees we intend to protect those for at least probably a 10 year period while we try to interplant trees create new tree wells in the concrete because obviously we're dealing with a lot of concrete down there so the sidewalks would have to be modified and we're that's all part of the plan and there's actually funding for that see what else here we have some legacy trees in Hubbard Park if you've been to the old shelter in Hubbard Park there's a beautiful green ash tree right there so we're hoping to treat some of those ash trees in the park most of the ash trees in the park are white ash trees I surveyed the trails and I identified 600 ash trees actually located them on I was a little anal about this I located them on a map and we have a plan that shows where they all are in the park and of those 600 there's about 170 that are right on the trail or overhang the trail so they would be a hazard when they get infested so we know where those are and the parks folks can deal with those most of the trees in the park will not be probably dealt with except for those few legacy trees we are hoping to set up a marshaling area which has been mentioned here earlier so that infested trees could be brought to the area and processed you can process them by chipping them you can process them by removing the outer inch of bark and utilizing the wood still it can be converted into firewood if it's outside of the flight season you can have folks pick up the firewood we were hoping to provide it to low income folks in fact would be something that we would hope the city council would buy into we do know about the hazardous trees and how expensive they are to remove so we want to be taking down trees once we've identified them as being infested the other aspect of this is the public we have lots of residents obviously with ash trees on their property we did a part of our preparedness plan was to determine or get an estimate as to how many ash trees were on private property so we took the took the grand list basically and I signed numbers to all the properties and then did a random number generator and pulled out 97 properties and we visited those and we actually surveyed their properties for ash trees and then we extrapolated out based on size of properties etc and we came up with an estimate of 2,700 ash trees on private property so that dwarfs the number that we have on the public right away so that's one way to get people involved is basically say look you're facing this too and some of these lots had quite a few ash trees I know my property has at least four so that's one way to get people engaged in this and we've one of our goals is to keep people informed and educated we have e-mail site now they can write in and ask questions EAB Montpelier at Montpelier-VT.org they can send in questions so when we send out information through front porch forum or the bridge possibly the Times Argus they can use that as a place to send in their messages it comes all those messages are directly transported to me or John Snell who's the chair of the tree board and we can get back to those people with some answers or find the answers if we don't know them terms of budgeting here's where the rubber hits the road back in 2013 we asked the city council we recommended to them that they put aside twenty thousand dollars a year to start thinking ahead because we're going to be faced with some expenses they didn't see the urgency of that and we didn't convince them because the bug wasn't here so it's hard to explain that it's going to be bad so we estimated in the initial year if our management plan was accepted that the initial cost would be around two hundred and thirty one thousand dollars to get things set up and that includes things including a reliable bucket truck which we don't have right now we have a bucket truck it's not really safe we have personnel costs we would think about having a portable sawmill chipper those kinds of things and setting up a marshaling area this is all wishful thinking in some ways but it's necessary a marshaling area that would have a chipper and sawmill and personnel or a contracted sawmill operator to deal with the wood that we're going to be generating in our plan the plan hasn't been approved yet hasn't been disapproved it hasn't been acted on and we're going to ask the city council to do something along those lines the subsequent costs would be around eighty nine thousand that includes the personnel because we'd like to have somebody on park staff that dealt with EAB we can't rely on volunteers forever we have to have someone that's actually embedded in the program the city council has approved an initial outlay of twenty thousand dollars that gets us through this period until they create their budget next year and this request for money will be part of everybody's request for money in the city budget and this competing obviously lots of competing requests in terms of fentanyl and all the things that the police deal with and you can see that there's a lot of things that the city has to deal with that can't all be funded so we're hopeful but we're not optimistic that we're going to get the amounts that we're asking for but maybe enough to get started I'll take some more questions if there are any what was that based on what's your budget based on the budget is based on is personnel costs tree removals monitoring these are right away trees and the trees that will be treating which aren't that expensive it's about a thousand bucks a year because it's every two years but if you buy a bucket truck and you set up a marsh on the area with fencing so that you don't have the wood fairies showing up and taking your wood all over all over the place and replanting and creating new tree wells bringing in the structural soil that you might need for those areas that we've all talked about we're all roadside is there any plan to mandate a treatment for private land? mandate? no the tree warden has rights to control infestations or trees that are a danger to the public so that would be up to the tree to determine whether or not a tree needed to be removed but if it's not a danger to the public we're not a nice ash on private property that I would highly recommend that they would consider treating if they want to keep those trees some beautiful ash trees green ash trees my question is similar so how are you delineating the municipal right away from private property? we're just dealing with in this plan we can only deal with the municipal right away trees the private trees we're just depending on those folks to be educated and informed and then possibly benefiting from this treatment option that would be available to everybody if we go with a vendor and get a better price my question is more basic and here you are on a street in Montpelier walking down the street how do you know what's the right away? because there's a list of street every street has a list with it's right away from the center line and that's what we used what about boundary trees? boundary trees trees sitting on the line we've considered anything that sits on the line has to be in the right way that's what we recommend turn on state right away state roads we haven't had to deal with that too much in general if the state AOT will be transferred has a plan they will have they will if the state manages the road in Montpelier though we do have the backdrop to the state house I know from personal experience there are a bunch of ash trees up there and the state is now involved in creating a management plan for that backdrop so that's not a catastrophic thing in a few years when all those ash trees are we have reached out to AOT as well and they do have a team that is working on it and I know they're actively working on it because they just sent me a contract language this week on what they're going to put in their contracts but work to slow the spread and then we're going to be doing a training for digital staff on management so again early on in their planning but they are they got a lot to deal with Joanne you haven't been involved in Montpelier broke through at all yet we have indirectly through Jeff Byer who's our tree warden and he has more contact with them we do deal with public works in Montpelier on a lot of matters and I haven't been involved in those discussions so Jeff and John Snell have been doing most of that I have a question for you John but also just a question of general how has the thought of parasitores and using those has that been brought up? we have that in our plan we don't think we're at that stage yet where the biological controls are at a level where we could count on them to do I think that's further down down the road and plus still be more research on that so maybe by slowing everything down we can take advantage of the research that's being done now to maybe save our last trees or some significant number of them in the future or maybe being able to stop treatment I don't know I would keep an eye on it it's doing some pretty interesting stuff whether using a multi-pronged approach that insecticides and movement trees but the parasitore it's working we need to we're not at the levels here to actually sustain the parasitore population it is part of the plan it's in our plan yes I see more in like in Hubbard Park Hubbard Park would be an ideal situation or even the backdrop to the state house which does dozens of ash trees back there I don't want to eat up too much more time everyone has tree valuables so I apologize for sitting we hope to engage you more but we have a dialogue all the time we should learn our lesson but this is our second one and we didn't get to it last time but just to wrap up again you have all the all of our resources we're sending you home with them but they're all available online including on the BTN Basics site there's actually a a whole section on resources for educators and volunteers so there's some pre-made power points they're narrated there are activities for kids so just for checking out again we can point your public populations too and it would be remiss to stop without mentioning that we do have some money a little tiny bit of money available our program is we have an annual grants program and this year and probably the foreseeable future will be mostly focused on EEV this year exclusively on EEV planning so this will be $2,000 which will be significant to get jobs started on our website there's information about specific examples of what this might look like but it could be used for hiring someone to write a plan working with RPCs to do an inventory buying an iPad so that you can do an inventory and not have to give it back to me at the end of your inventory to have it on hand education, outreach green traps, prison traps so you can do your own monitoring the only things that are not going to be covered under this plan and also replanting so $2,000 isn't very far for trees but it's something and it could be a great demonstration or public awareness opportunity the only things that you can't use this money for are tree removals and insecticide treatments and that second piece it's mostly because it's a long-term commitment to do a commitment for EAB so we don't want towns to become reliant on us that needs to be a commitment that's made by the town if you're not signed up for our EAB update listserv basically just put your email address in there and the only time you would ever get an email is that there's an update on a new detection of EAB so this is a great way to be aware of where it's spreading right now there's still our press releases that are going out when EAB's found but at some point we'll probably reach a point where that's not necessarily going to happen every time a new site is discovered so this is a way that you can be kept abreast of that and then we have a newsletter that if you're not on our Tree Mail newsletter it's a great way to be aware of other grant opportunities and we've already talked about this but just the five takeaways EAB's here if you don't treat your trees 99% of them will ask trees will succumb to EAB municipalities are going to have to do something now's a good time to plan right now in order to plan you have to inventory so that's a great first step and you can always learn more at our two websites you want to mention? I want just a few minutes of your time for central Brabant communities although the rest of your communities are all part of a regional planning commission so they may offer similar services we do have a grant to help two communities on the inventory process and then to help you develop that management plan so I left some business cards back there but there are three ways we can assist you we can help you through that if you're working with volunteers for inventory this is your training team by the way but then we'll follow through with the volunteers we'll work with you at the town level on the management plan and then help you integrate that into other planning documents like your local hazard mitigation plan the second avenue is our transportation program is actually working with very town to do an inventory that program we can fund 90% of the inventory you provide the 10% match and that is our staff going out or we'll go out with your staff and do some sort of team effort we do a lot of that with bridges and culvert inventories with different kinds of road inventories that your town road foreman are involved with and then the third way is we're there you could just come and hire us you can also hire other people not us, not us but we have staff go out in the field and do a lot of inventory for towns as part of this effort I also wanted you to know Elise talked about mapping we're promoting because not many towns are taking advantages that every town in our region is eligible for 12 free hours of mapping service every year and that's your conservation commission your road foreman select board planning commission DRB whoever needs maps please know that that's out there we're happy to provide more services than that and we'll give you a cost estimate up front so you know whether those 12 free hours will take care of that so EAB is one place where you can take your inventory and get hard copy maps of some of what you see here tonight did not count towards your 12 hours it can help with those planning tools so then the second piece I wanted to let you know is just we'll be doing just a survey how did we do tonight I'll put you a survey monkey or Nancy will if you wouldn't mind filling that out we'd greatly appreciate it and do apologize that we did not get to I know and I want to follow up on Jenny's comment the landowner owns the trees they own the wood we tell rope who is this all the time in practice a lot of time it gets removed you should have a conversation if you are going to remove it leave it there I think you just got to up your PR and talk to them about taking it quickly off the right away and another takeaway I heard was we got to find out about utility right away