 a beautiful fall evening and spend a couple of hours on what some people regard as a little bit of an esoteric subject. That is what's going on in our area with the emerald ash borne infestation. It's an important issue and you probably wouldn't be here but that you recognize that. We hope at the end of the evening though we've given you a detailed idea of what's going on and what this workshop is really about is to actually be, to give you some practical alternatives about analyzing what you may have on your own private property or if you are an institutional land owner of some kind, a corporate land owner and you have ash trees there. We wanna give you an idea of what's going on there and what options you have available to you. I've been with the Sheboygan Rotary Club just about 20 years now, Tony Fessler and sit on the board of the Rotary Club. We are partnered as I think you perhaps know from some of our material with an organization that's also represented here tonight, the Lakeshore Natural Resource Partnership. And at the moment we have two and I think soon to be three of their representatives, Jim Kettler in the back who will bail me out when I say something I shouldn't perhaps and has forgotten more about a lot of what we're doing perhaps than I am that he's somebody who works full time in the ecology conservation area. Their network stems from Ozaki and Milwaukee all the way north to Dore County and then inland, what would you say, Jim, 100 miles? Yeah, very, very active set of partnerships they have not just in Sheboygan County but we're fortunate to have them as a partner to work with us technically. And then Kendra Kelling in the back who is really the project officer in many respects that has devoted a lot of time to working on the emerald ash borer and she's also a great wealth of knowledge and energy that has helped us get this program off the ground. We have three things, oh and I guess the other thing I absolutely need to do is thank Maywood and Dave Cook who's with us tonight. Dave is also a great supporter of what we're doing and kind of a partner in this enterprise as well and has helped with us in trying to provide information to not only the folks that are here this evening but the younger members of our community doing a lot of education, the schools and many things that Maywood is involved in. So we are fortunate to have a number of people pulling in the same direction that we are. What I'm gonna do is present to you for about 20, 25 minutes at most. We are then gonna have the city forester with city of Sheboygan who's with us, Bull who will give you a presentation which I think is illustrative of what's being done on a government basis to deal with the emerald ash borer, what they are doing, what they have done historically, what their objectives are, what their resources are that are available to them, how they're trying to redirect resources and I think frankly with this group equally important he will tell you about what these municipalities aren't going to do. It's not that they don't want to but they have limited resources. So we find that most of the folks we talk to who are private landowners, institutional landowners think that this is completely the government's problem and they don't have to do anything about it. The government's gonna come in and resolve all and while it's good we have great confidence in government and we have some really good people working on it the truth of the matter is and I hope if you leave with nothing else you'll understand at the end of the evening the government simply can't resolve this whole problem. We have to get the public engaged in it, people like you folks that are with us this evening. So it's important I think to hear his presentation and just looking at what Sheboygan which is particularly well resourced I might say to deal with this problem and where they are with it, where they're going and what you as individual landowners need to do and also helping us get this message out to the public. And then finally we have Bob Gluck. Bob has been involved in a variety of contractual work in dealing with emerald ash borer and many other tree diseases. First with his own business and now with the Hoppe organization out of visit Milwaukee Bob or West Alice. Okay and they're probably of all the contractors at least in this part of the state of Wisconsin there is no contractor more engaged and more knowledgeable about tree diseases and certainly the emerald ash borer. So we've asked Bob to give you an idea of options that are open to you frankly what the costs may be, what risks are out there. Bob will probably point out that emerald ash borer is not the only thing you're gonna be dealing with but obviously I've got him focused tonight particularly on the EAB problem. Okay as we go along there are essentially no rules here. This is a workshop so if you wanna interrupt you disagree with something a speaker says or you wanna ask a question we would welcome of course those questions or comments from you. The first time we did this back in June we had quite a bit of engagement and as my dad an old trial lawyer and Sheboygan would say there is no stupid question except the one that's never asked. So please be involved with us and we'll all learn I think from questions it usually means that we're not covering some area that we should be. As we get started any other comments Dave anything I've forgotten here or okay. I have a brief presentation which I'll try to get us through. Again our objective is to get you out of here on time. The consortium that we have here which I've referred to is called Restoration of Archery Sheboygan. It's been in operation just about a year now. It operates based on a cooperative memorandum of understanding that the Sheboygan Rotary Club negotiated if you would with our partner Lakeshore Natural Resource Partnership and we come together under this acronym Roots or Restoration of Archery Sheboygan. Again LNRP provides the technical know-how a lot of the staffing capacity that they have since they have Kendra and Jim and other members of their team as full-time staff and then the Rotary Organization has about a hundred members we meet once a week and we then provide we hope the networking capacity and capability here to focus on this problem in the Sheboygan County area. Roots is by its definition designed to look at emerald ash borer in Sheboygan County not that the ash borer don't jump the county lines and go into Manitowoc and Fond du Lac of course they do but we've picked a geographical area and we're focused on that as well. I might say that what we've been trying to do here is of great interest particularly to the Wisconsin DNR because if we are successful in energizing the public and the corporate side, the private side if you would of what we have here in Sheboygan County with both knowledge-based and also with financial capability it will be a great help we think to the municipalities and to the county governments here in combating what is a massive ecological problem. So the DNR is a great help to us and we actually have some considerable DNR financial support for what we're doing a grant that Jim and Kendra have applied for at LNRP that we received a year ago that is helping with urban planning and particularly we're working in the townships that have really no capacity for evaluating EAB within their areas and don't have forestry plans. Jim and Kendra and the staff at LNRP and some volunteers are working in that area. The DNR as I said has funded at least modestly funded that effort right now which is well underway and I guess so far you are working in actively in five townships thereabouts and we hope to get to the remaining ones as well. So that's what Roots is, we have a website and you can reach us without any difficulty. I guess I'm told this clicker works so we'll see if I get, there we go. The origin of the emerald ash borer many of you may know this already. This is a scary looking depiction of the actual beetle itself. Actually it fits about half, if you have a penny it's about half the size of a penny and it's I think half inch or less so it's really a very tiny animal despite the fact it looks a little scary. As best anyone knows the origin of it was probably in Western Asia and China and Korea. It arrived in the Detroit area we think about the turn of the century maybe 2001, 2002. It most likely came in palates from China on container ships and unfortunately before anybody in lower Michigan realized what was going on this thing had metastasized and had spread all over initially the Detroit and Dearborn area and then within a fairly short period of time had expanded throughout much of the Midwest and obviously arrived in Wisconsin as well. This is the life cycle of the bug if you would and we can start I suppose with the eggs down here on the lower right. They're small kind of a reddish brown color very, very tiny as you can see there if you can read that one millimeter in size very hard to spot. The eggs hatch after a period of time and turn into that ugly larvae you see over there on the lower left a segment kind of thing. I'm passing out a vial that has an example of a full grown larvae there. You might have a look at that and that's the critter that really does the damage. It gets inside the bark in the outer area of ash trees and it seems to focus on the ash. I've been asked whether the bug actually infests other trees and as far as I know it's just the ash. The guide help us if it expands beyond that but at the moment we're dealing with the ash and then it forms those galleries which you'll see in another slide and which are also depicted in that example that I'm putting out and of course that's what kills the tree because the tree can't get its natural nutrients. Over a winter then of course the thing turns into this pubate stage in the wood bark and then it presents of course as the actual adult beetle itself which is of course what you tend to see and hear about and of course that animal bores into the tree again and the cycle starts over, lays its eggs. It metastasizes and expands very, very quickly. So we're usually talking about one to two years in terms of the life cycle development. Is that, I'm right on that in terms of the city's understanding of what's going on, that's my understanding of the life cycle. So the thing as I said is very hard to kill. It isn't a matter of spraying the trees. Sheboygan for those of you who are my age and have as much gray hair as I do will remember of course the Dutch Elm disease problem where I can remember as a kid in Sheboygan spraying the trees with DDT which right now wouldn't be a real good idea but we didn't know that at that time. And so obviously I don't know if DDT would be effective on these things that probably would, it's effective on us. But we're obviously the city and the municipalities and the government can't go spraying these trees with that kind of a strong pesticide. So quite frankly the bad news is there is very little that you can do about this except to treat the tree individually. And Bob Gluck and Tim will talk a little bit about the process and how they actually treat the trees. There are some options but it's not the sort of thing where we can overfly vast areas of forest land and treat it. I said it was a small beetle and there's a depiction on a penny. It shows you how small the thing is. And of course those are examples that we're passing out. And again what the galleries look like on the right. And then the segmented larvae itself. Flat headed kind of larvae. Again very hard to see, they tend to be small. If you peel back the bark of an infested tree you probably will see those ugly galleries where of course what's happening is the bug is killing the tree by in effect consuming and interrupting the life cycle or the flow of the material up and down the tree. Okay some indications of what happens when this occurs. For one thing you get dead branches towards the top of the tree usually first or early on. And the epicormic sprouting as they say in the upper left hand corner you see the S shaped galleries under the bark. The bark has a tendency to split. If you see any of that on your property with trees and you look carefully you probably have it. There are numerous examples that I see throughout this area and if you before all the leaves fall off the trees the next time any of you drive down to Milwaukee on the interstate during the daytime. Once you get about as far as Cedar Grove not Cedarburg, Cedar Grove and you look to the left and right you will see vast areas of woods that are denuded that have no leaves. Those are ash trees that have been killed by this thing. It hasn't of course spread north as yet in significant amounts to Sheboygan at least isn't manifesting itself yet but our areas up here are gonna look just like that in a matter of a year or two. And I'm gonna show you again a graph that has been provided to us by the DNR that will show you the life cycle and how this thing takes an impact. You can see in the lower right woodpecker damage the woodpeckers get at these larvae and eggs when they can but we don't have enough woodpeckers to deal with the emerald ash borer. Again examples of the larvae and the exit holes once the eggs develop and the beetle itself is fully developed it exits through a kind of a D-shaped hole in the tree and as you look at some of these samples that we are passing around which came both from Maywood here. Dave's helped us with that and also from the DNR it'll give you an idea of what this thing, the damage it does and what it looks like. Sorry. Okay, what about the spread? And I said with this whole thing as far as we can tell started in Detroit. This is what's happening in Wisconsin. In 2008 you see the single dot at least that's the one the DNR knew about which is down I guess that would be in the Ozaki area. Okay, thanks. And we're gonna show you some photographs of what that area looks like right now. Did everybody hear what Bob said? As to where it was, okay. And then you take a look at where we were in 2018 and you can see how the thing is expanded and exploded into particularly eastern Wisconsin but is working its way west. Interestingly enough of course it's moved largely by firewood being moved by human beings. So the thing is spread all over the place. It hasn't at least as of 2018 the detections are limited in the northern part of the state but it's a matter of time until it works its way north into the state. And as you can see Sheboygan County, Ozaki, Milwaukee are heavily infested at this point with the emerald ash for itself. And these are again indications of where the DNR has detected the bug. There may be places they haven't detected that it's located as well. They have a ban on moving firewood and that's certainly slowing it. The other question I frequently get in these sessions is well you read last summer or last winter we had these very, very cold Arctic conditions over a period of time and there were indications in the newspapers that the University of Minnesota and University of Michigan said that was killing the larvae and was killing the eggs and didn't that put an end to all of this? Well it helped. It has slowed down the infestation rate but the DNR will be quick to tell you that that's all it's done. It's slowed it down and it will come back and I guess if you look at the science of if you would that's going on here in effect the bugs and the eggs that make it through that if anything are the tougher ones and as they procreate if anything the disease over time will probably even get stronger through the process of natural selection. I'm a lawyer by the way and not a biologist you'll guess if you haven't already guessed that so I will depend on the more science folks here to bail me out if I say something wrong but basically it's a good news, bad news situation when we have a cold winter. Slows it down but the bugs and the eggs that make it through if anything are more lethal than ever so it's no ultimate solution here and even though we may have another cold winter I don't know. This is what our organization looks like we're not gonna talk too much about that if you wanna know more go to our website or talk with us afterwards but essentially the LNRP and the Rotary have come together to do three things. Implementation of an investment fund we're trying to raise money through private and corporate money that would then be available to the city of Sheboygan the county and municipalities throughout Sheboygan county to buy trees to non-ash trees obviously to create a more diverse population of trees particularly in the municipalities what you're gonna learn from the city is they just simply don't have the budget resources to do everything that they need to do they're gonna be cutting more trees down than they're gonna be planning not cause they don't wanna do something about it but there are limitations as to what they can do and I won't steal the city's thunder on that one but to me that's something that should be an attention getter for you. So we're trying through this roots organization to raise resources that are not government based to try to do something about it. I use an old Navy term of mine as a return naval officer I say it's a matter of trying to get all hands on deck we need the public engaged we need private organizations engaged Maywood obviously is helping and we need organizations like Maywood to step up and certainly David and Maywood are doing that but we've gotta get this word out to the public by and in large quite frankly the public doesn't know what's going on here. We still don't completely have the media's attention WHBL has been very helpful to us and we're gonna continue to work with them the two no cost newspapers in Sheboygan the Beacon and the Sun are helping us I haven't had much success with the other major newspaper in the area I'm working on that but I haven't got their attention apparently Gannett is not terribly interested as yet in the problem but we're trying to get them engaged and I realize I'm on channel eight right now so we'll see if this makes any difference we do appreciate channel eight being with us and helping us as well but we've gotta get this message out to the media and out to the public at large as to how devastating this thing is going to be for us we'll get into a little bit more of that then the other part of what we're doing is the planning and urban forestry grants and LNRP is the lead on that they've done a wonderful job of bringing in resources they've got the DNR involved and we're about to, I don't know if we can go public yet but they're about to go public on one or two additional grants these are government based grants that will bring in resources to Sheboygan County that wouldn't otherwise be here but for the grant writing that Kendra and Jim have done with LNRP for which I'm most appreciative and it's gonna make a difference there we're trying to do things that wouldn't otherwise be done in planting, planning and planting eventually trees so to bring those special resources in here that will help the county and if there's time later Kendra and Jim can maybe talk a little bit about that and finally what you're involved with tonight which is to attempt to engage the community in matters of urban forestry and knowledge about what's going on because the average person on the street at least we're running into throughout Sheboygan County just still doesn't understand the nature of this infestation that it's at least as bad as what we put up within the 1950s with the Dutch Elm disease which was devastating to Sheboygan and as I said that I've been around as long as I have but we'll remember the impact that had on the city of Sheboygan and Plymouth and Coer and other places as well basically this is a slide I'll let you look at I'm not gonna read it all to you but the bottom line is that trees are good for public health, they make a great difference that shows you the extent of ash trees in the area and what they do in terms of removal of pollutants and with their contribution of inserting if you would oxygen and removing of course carbon dioxide and for anybody that and I hope most of this group probably is concerned about global warming and some of the implications of global warming there is probably no better way to deal with that quite frankly than to increase the population of trees and to enhance the if you would the number of trees that we have in any given area so this is a positive thing in terms of dealing with the disease and isn't but certainly replanting trees and maintaining a healthy tree canopy is absolutely critical here. You can see some of the data there's a lot here about what an individual tree can do in terms of capturing rainwater reducing flooding and we've certainly seen plenty of that in this part of Wisconsin. You increase the number of trees, it helps with that runoff and of course as I said generally just is a positive factor in terms of reduction of air pollution and you can put that into dollar numbers which is what this slide does. I'm not gonna read all of that to you and it's widely understood that a large tree canopy is good for public health across the board so that's one of the major benefits we're trying to get that message out that it makes a difference in terms of healthy environment. And then we're also trying to make the case I guess particularly for our corporate donor community and private concerns as well, foundations that tree filled neighborhoods are certainly safer more pleasant places actually demonstrates that communities with large tree canopies are more pleasant places, believe it or not I guess they tell me that if you have them in malls people buy more and feel more inclined to go to a mall not that we're promoting necessarily consumerism but there is actually a connection there for all of that. So what we do find is Wisconsin's attractive place for the workforce here in many respects because of what trees do for us in our overall environment in terms of sporting activities and just the aesthetics of the state. If I have a daughter right at the moment that is involved in working with a government project and she is in located in Eastern Washington I don't know how many of you people have driven into Eastern Washington but there aren't many trees and it's not a very pleasant place and I talked to her just earlier today she actually wishes she could be back here it's just not aesthetically a very pleasing place and has its real limitations. We're really privileged in Wisconsin to have the beautiful tree canopy and all of the wonderful things that just exhibit right outside here tonight in Maywood. Much of that tree canopy is now at risk. Again I won't read the slide to you but just generally a very positive impact. Positive impact. The other argument we make as we talk to folks is that there are actually dollar and sense advantages to having a healthy tree canopy. You can see what some of those are you can put dollar numbers on that it certainly saves on the cooling bill in the summer if you're air conditioning and even if you're not it makes it a more pleasant environment and cooler and then in the winter it actually saves trees will save heating costs and you can see what some of those numbers look like plus it's demonstrating and I think any realtor will tell you that a healthy tree canopy on a piece of individual property enhances the value of the property itself. So in addition to all the good environmental things it does it over a lifetime can have quite a difference in terms of heating and cooling costs and if you don't have trees you do end up with I guess the eastern Washington environment which isn't the best I guess for what we wanna do here. Again I'm not gonna, in the interest of time I won't read all of that to you and we can certainly make these slides available if you would like. Public recreation is something we like to talk a lot about because most Wisconsinites have one or more forms of public education that they're in love with whether you are a fisherman or a hunter they've just come back from a terrific canoeing trip although I guess it wasn't in Wisconsin you went up to Lake Superior but we certainly have those wonderful opportunities in Wisconsin that in terms of our rivers if you like to bike, if you like to jog trees are almost a critical part of every form of public education. So we need them and what I'm about to tell you is that a very, very high percentage of our tree population in Wisconsin is now at risk as a result of this it's why we're talking about it because we have such a high population of ash trees that we're trying to do something about. This is an example of an area, this happens to be the Toledo before the emerald ash borer struck and as you can see it's a beautiful tree it reminds me a little of the old days in Sheboygan when we had before the Dutch Elm disease and then what happened and that's what it looks like after the disease has had its impact pretty dramatic. It takes about a year or two once this thing is infested in an area to change from what you did see to this area that is presented in this slide and you notice the grass is green here so it isn't a matter of our tricking you by taking slides that were in the deepest part of the winter so we're in an area where those trees should be fully aided and they're not. I don't know how much of this shows up on Channel 8 but hopefully viewers will get some idea here. Again, City of Toledo now, I will agree that this is a winter shot so you wouldn't expect to see fully aided trees certainly in that area and if it's the shot I think it is, this is an area after those trees have been removed and once the tree is completely infected it has to be cut down and you're gonna hear a little bit about what the city's doing right now in Sheboygan because they have to and what their plans are but it's quite a difference from the aesthetics of a neighborhood that has a nice tree canopy and what happens in the aftermath of this thing. Again, more of these sorts of shots here. I don't know if this was Toledo or not and then that's the aftermath of how ugly it is after those trees have been removed and as this infestation moves into our area and we're right in the cusp of it right now you're going to see plenty of that. So what Roots is trying to do here with our public grants, our government grants what we're trying to raise from private resources is we're trying to get ahead of this to the, we probably, we can't stop the disease. The city is doing what it can and will continue to in terms of injecting these trees with chemicals but what we wanna do is plant a diverse substitute stock of trees here so that we can get ahead of this thing as early as we can. Again, more, I think these are, there are trees that get an idea of how it kills from the top part of the tree down. You're probably already seeing a good deal of this in some of our area. If you start, if you haven't been looking up at trees Kendra was kidding me the other day and she says she finds herself now after all this spending a lot of time looking up at trees to see what's going on. If you haven't started doing this, it's a little late now because we're losing the trees naturally, losing leaves naturally but you're going to see more and more of this defoliation of the trees. And again, an area where trees have been removed in the aftermath here. This one is, this is a city of Sheboygan shut, I think, isn't it? If I'm not mistaken. And this is on this, yes it is, I believe. On the south side of Sheboygan will give you some idea of a foliated area. Yes it is. Self, I can't. What is it? 10th. Self 10th. And don't blame this guy over here, he's, I mean they don't have a choice as to what they have to do once the infestation. That's what it looks like afterward. I don't think there's anybody in the room would say that that's a more attractive shot once these things come down. So that's what we're in for here and we've got to get at replanting street trees, dealing with our parks, trying to treat them when we can and the resources just as you're about to hear aren't there to do it. We've got to get the public engaged. Bob was talking about Newberg, which is an example, my right Bob, an example of where this thing early on was impactful in our area, Newberg, Wisconsin. You can see some of the devastation of some of those trees and that picture there, which is, I guess it says 2012. Here's some more devastation in the Newberg, Wisconsin area. All those trees you see in those slides are ash trees, they've been denuded, they're dead. They're gone. And one of the things that LNRP is particularly concerned about correctly so because they've been working in the environmental area for many, many years is once these trees die, even if there's no one cutting them and they fall over on their own, I guess what happens then? You get invasive species moving in, so it not only does it involve the animals in the area, but you don't always get desirable trees and other plants substituting. You get fragmites, Jim, and are there other things in particular that come to mind? Honey suckle. Honey suckle. So you don't get desirable second growth or follow on growth once this happens. And LNRP's grants that they've been writing speak to some of that issue as well as just the loss of the trees because LNRP has been fighting fragmites and other invasive species here for many years. Dealing with this problem will help try to fend off that fragmites and the invasive species problem. Again, if you want to take a look at what's already going on down in Ozaki and Milwaukee County in a very big way you take a look at this picture of 2012 in Newburgh. Again, those are all ash trees you can see and they're dead and major impact on the forested area there. That's all moving into Sheboygan County. That's 20, obviously you can read that 2014 and not far from us. This thing quite frankly what's happened is I've already alluded to this is the disease itself, the infestation has essentially moved north and it is moving right now and sort of the eastern side of the state of Wisconsin and is headed in a northerly direction. It's infesting our area right at the moment. Certainly it's reached points further north but the impact was further south initially and is now moving into this area very actively. And I think I've got a slide. I hope I've got the one that the DNR indicated and sort of shows you lethality. This is I think a Sheboygan County. These are Sheboygan County numbers as the inventory of just urban trees. Let me get the rest of these on. The number of ash, this was based on a survey that was done I believe in 2010. Does that sound right? 2010 I think a DNR survey and it would be general but you can see the city of Sheboygan with their trees if you would. The numbers are much greater if you start to look. So about 23% of trees in the city of Sheboygan right now almost one out of every four trees is an ash tree. And we will go going back to that earlier slide where we talked about the benefit that these trees yield. It gives you some idea of the dollar benefit here. Sheboygan has a large number of maple trees thanks to what we did in the 1950s and 60s when we had the Dutch Elm disease. We planted, guess what, a lot of ash trees because they were plentiful, they were inexpensive. We did plant a lot of maple trees as well but what you want is a diverse if you would tree canopy with many different kinds of trees. Unfortunately, most municipalities don't have the sort of diversity that we now know is important. The idea of diversity and the sort of the biological interest of having diversity across the board was not something well understood, frankly. When I went to North High School 1,000 years ago we didn't talk a lot about it. We now understand it but the science has come along ways that we understand the benefit of having a blend of many different kinds of trees. So we have, unfortunately, even though we all have maple trees and they're beautiful, we have a high percentage of ash, a high percentage of maple and the question, of course, is are the maples vulnerable to the ash borer? Not to the ash borer but there are some other diseases that Bob may want to refer to that put the maple at some risk as well. Not immediately but we obviously would like to have a more diverse tree canopy than we have right now. So it's not an ideal situation. 10% genus is desired for any given tree. We're obviously not there when we have 23% ash and 34% maple. Obviously in terms of roots and what we're trying to do through these grants and raising private money is when we turn around with a matching grant and make resources available to the city of Sheboygan or to the county or Plymouth or other areas, we are going to demand, of course, that any of our resources that are available in matching grants be invested in planting a diverse tree canopy and we have every reason to believe that the municipalities and the county now understand that point. We didn't understand it 30 or 40 years ago but none of us did, I guess, at that point. Okay, so urban tree inventory and this is rough but you can see what it looks like. This would be for, I guess, the city of Sheboygan, I believe, run over those numbers again so I don't have to tell you that having that percentage of ash trees for the city of Sheboygan is not a good thing. You look at Plymouth, you look at Coer, Sheboygan Falls, any place throughout the county these numbers look just about the same percentage-wise. It isn't just Sheboygan, it has a lot of ash trees. It's a problem throughout. In fact, if anything in rural areas, there's even a higher percentage of ash trees. The town of Sheboygan, for example, where I live, has an even higher percentage of ash trees, very, very heavily ash. I think the numbers, as I recall, may run 30 and 35% in some of these townships. And even as you go out tonight, if it's still, there's any daylight left, you'll see plenty of ash trees on the Maywood property. David, are you here? I just went out. Okay, I'm sure he would confirm that. Not by choice, it's just it's probably the most indigenous tree we have in the state of Wisconsin. Okay, again, some more tree numbers. That's, the DBH stands for essentially measuring the diameter of the tree at breast height. Thanks. As I said, I have to have the scientists bail me out here. And you can see significant numbers. This is, I guess, Sheboygan County. It's obviously a bit of an estimate, but that's 14 million plus trees. There's a lot of ash trees that we have in rural areas. And again, you can see over 5 million of them are in ash. All of you in this room are probably familiar with many of the areas where you see the highest numbers of ash trees. Everybody here has been to the Sheboygan Marsh. The Sheboygan Marsh is heavily ash. I'm sure it's far higher than 20 or 30% ash. Those are all going to be infected and will be eliminated eventually. So here you see 34% ash. These numbers are ballpark, but what we're trying to demonstrate is how severe this problem is. And it isn't a matter of spraying the trees. As I've said, they're gonna die. If they're in rural areas, they're largely just gonna fall over on their own because they can't hope to treat all of these trees. This is an interesting slide, I think, and was provided to us really by the DNR. And the point here is it shows the ash mortality and what goes on here from roughly the first time the tree is infected, let's say in year one to zero. And sort of the, when you find the ash borne area initially, as you can see, not a whole, not a great percentage of trees are immediately infected and you at least don't indicate, you don't see the indication of the infestation. But when as you look at that slide to the right, once you get out to about year six or seven, look what starts to happen. The eggs and the infestation begins, of course, to increase dramatically and you can see what then happens within from about year six on through 12 and 13, you have the percentage of the ash tree population being infected very, very quickly and the actual elimination of the tree. So where we are in Sheboygan right now in Sheboygan County is we're probably, I think the DNR would tell you that we're probably at about year six or seven or maybe as far as eight. If you go further south into that Newburgh area and Bob, you correct me if I'm wrong, but they're probably at year 10 or 11, which is why you see those massive die-offs there. We're not, by any means immune from it here, we're just at an earlier stage. So as this disease moves north, you see greater and greater lethality of the overall ash tree population. Once the ash trees are infected, they become brittle. Unlike some trees that give you some warning when they're going to come down, they often give you little or no warning, they just fall and there's tremendous damage done to property if it's near the tree itself, automobiles, obviously even the potential personal injury in a park area, which is why the city and the municipalities have to get at these things when there are street trees near sidewalks or when they are located adjacent to a park or in a park itself. You can't just let the trees stand there. These limbs come off in windstorms or sometimes even unannounced and can be surprising. One of the things about the ash bore and the way it deals with trees is it has this impact of actually splitting the tree at the base in ways that sometimes aren't totally predictable and the next two speakers will talk about the dangers of actually having to eliminate these trees that you can't just put crews up on the trees, easily having them climb the trees and drop the limbs because of the danger involved. So Bob and his crews and the city have to approach this in a very, very careful way so that there's no personal injury with the elimination of the tree once you've made the decision that it has to go. Obviously in a forest area, you can let the tree fall but if you're talking about street trees or in a municipal park, that's a different story. You've got to be proactive in eliminating them. Again, some depictions of what happens with the stresses and the limbs and how they fall and again, the next two speakers are expert on that and I can't hope to address it in the detail they will. Some idea of what happens in a significant windstorm after the tree has been infected. I can't tell you where this picture was taken. I assume probably somewhere in Michigan where the infestation has been involved. I don't know the location of the slide, obviously in the winter. Where they actually managed to capture an ash tree falling over on a moving car and it's this car where you see this thing go right through the windshield and I hope the driver made it out and you see the tree falling into the windshield of the car. If that doesn't get your attention, I don't know what. Again, some idea of how difficult it is to deal with these trees once they become infected and why you absolutely have to do something with those that are close to property or can pose a personal injury. Again, that same chart of the mortality rate with EAB. One of the frustrations I'll be honest with you that I have in dealing with the Roots organization and trying to raise money from private sources here in the community is we are, I guess, maybe thankfully not very far along in that lethality curve right at the moment so I still get a reaction from a good many people I talk to less informed than this group will be hopefully after this evening that well, we don't think anything's happening here or if it is happening, we can easily take care of it or it'll be the government's responsibility and in most cases it's because we're, people have only experienced the early years of this mortality curve but I have said it's just a matter of a year or two before you see such dramatic changes here that obviously people will realize they've got to be involved if you want a tree canopy in replanting diverse trees other than ash in our community. And just more of the same sort of thing that is I'm sure familiar to the city and Bob Gluck who will talk about this in greater detail. So that's it. I want to leave plenty of time for the other speakers. Any questions as I end this introductory portion here? If not, I will, none? Okay, Tim, if I can ask you to take over from here. Hi everyone, my name is Tim. City Forester, City of Sheboygan. Little background of myself, I have a degree from the University of Stevens Point in 2011, Urban Forestry and Forest Management. I'm a certified arborist. I'm an ISA tree risk assessment qualified and I'm a TCIA tree care safety professional. I was hired with the city in 2016 as part of the tree crew as an arborist mostly to start treating ash trees and continue to cut and trim trees in the city. This year, 2019, I became the City Forester. They needed some more help as some more guidance, some more leadership, so I took over for that. What about you guys? Are any of you guys Sheboygan City residents? Okay, a couple. Do you guys, any of you have ash trees on your property? And are any of you treating those ash trees? Okay, all right, good. So to get started, the city has a tree inventory. It was, Tony mentioned it was 2010 where the county did kind of a big one, the whole county. So this is mostly that data and then some of our own to update it. But every tree, I got a computer version and a version on an iPad I can take out in the field. But every tree is one of those dots. So the colors are different species. The blue are ash trees. The, in 2016, EAB Emerald Ash Board was officially confirmed within the city of Sheboygan. And at that time it was estimated about 5,000 public ash trees. And so that was a big part of them bringing me on. They were like, hey, this issue is definitely here and we need to start doing something about it. And we need to get a plan. So they made a plan to handle it and some of that stuff here. So the plan was to remove all the ash trees that were less than 12 inches in diameter at breast height, four and a half feet above ground. So all the small ash trees, it was decided just get rid of them because they're easy to cut down at this point. And it's not worth trying to save the little ones and get them till they're big and then cut them down, it's a lot more challenging. So the other part of the decision was to treat half of, or roughly half, 2,400 of the current ash trees of the 5,000, pick the 2,400 best ones, treat those, keep those alive, remove the small ones and remove all the other ones that aren't as desirable. And when I say desirable, the ones that were chosen were maybe planted in better spots versus other spots like if they were planted under power lines, which they shouldn't have never been to begin with, we didn't treat those. Or if they were planted in a really narrow parkway where they're lifting the sidewalk every two years, we didn't try to treat those. We picked the ones that were in better locations. So the treatment involves what we do, what I do is a trunk injecting. So there's a couple other maybe treatments out there, but the best, what I recommend, what I've done, prior to the city, I worked private company treating ash trees. And that's what we did. We trunk injected them, you drill into the tree, you can see up here, this is the system I use, it's about a pencil-sized hole, each one of these all the way around the tree, this tree might have six or seven or eight holes, it's all hooked up. And according to the diameter of the tree is how much insecticide goes in. And here we use it, we use the rate of five milliliters per diameter range. So it's kind of a range, there's a range of what people could use, and that's what the city has decided to use. Is it necessarily the best they could do more? Probably, but it's a good compromise to try to keep the trees alive, but yet not break the bank. So MMMectin benzoate is the active ingredient in insecticide, there's several of them out there, probably, I can think of five that are different trade names and different formulations, but the key ingredient is MMMectin benzoate. And really, I've used three or four of them with the same results, so that's the big takeaway. So in 2017, I started treating trees in the city, and really, I'm only treating the trees that are, oh, I must have missed that slide, between the street and the sidewalk are the city's responsibility, and if there's no sidewalk, then the city usually owns like maybe six or 10 feet, and then all the park trees the city owns. So anything in backyards or even front yards, the city doesn't deal with it, so. That was that 5,000 number, and the 2,400 number that was treated. So in 2017, I treated 1,200 ash trees, and you can see the map is to Boygen, every one of those yellow arrows is an ash tree that was treated. And each ash tree that was treated, I would spray a blue dot on it. So if you're driving around and you see a blue dot, that's what it means, it was treated. In 2018, I treated the other 1,200 trees. So that gives us the total of 2,400. Now it's a future retreatment, so 800 trees every year. So this year being 2019, instead of retreating the same 1,200 that were treated in 2017, the city decided to change it up and do a three-year treatment instead of a two-year. So we're gonna treat those same 2,400 trees, but we're over three years. So 800 this year, I treated, 800 next year, 800 the following year. Now, those 800 trees this year, you guys might ask how, what the success rate was. Everybody wants to know that. So I only treated 800 of the 1,200 that were treated in 2017. So I chose 800 of these, basically I avoided these trees and I treated these trees this year. And of those 800, I treated 800, and there was five of those that I had to skip that for whatever reason, they didn't look good enough to retreat in my opinion. So some of them, the whole tree wasn't dead, it was just maybe half of it was dead and the other half was alive and maybe that means the MMectin benzoate didn't get in that other half for whatever reason or maybe it would already have too much damage. So five out of 800, which is a really good number. Now, next year I'll treat the remaining 400 and then I'll treat 400 of these that were treated in 2018. And my success rate, I'm curious to see how that'll go, being the fact that the ones that were treated in 2018 had another whole year of damage before they were first initially treated. So I'll know more as the time goes. But as far as removals, we got 4,400 current ash trees. Of course this isn't exact, but that's the best I can do, estimate. 24 have been treated and about 2,000 still need to be removed. So we've cut down this year about six or between six and 700 trees that the city's crew did and probably 400 of those were ash, 400 to 500. So we still got other trees dying, maples and lindens and storm damage and things happening. It's not just ash trees that we gotta focus on, but bringing up our crew for the city. We have myself as a city forester and I'll help in with the crew when I can. We have four full-time employees that are on the tree crew. So there's not too many of us, but they're a question there. So all of these are on public property? Every one of those is between the street and the sidewalk or in a park. So we have four people that are working for us. Would we do everything from trimming, elevating the trees, getting them high enough so vehicles can go under them, cutting trees down, stump grinding and then treating the trees with the trunk injection. And there's probably more missing, but that's what we do now. This ash tree dilemma has really caused us to put more of our resources into cutting these ash trees down because they're dying, they're standing there dead and it's dangerous. So this year, one of the big changes I made early on was I stopped stump grinding. So right now I don't have a picture of it, but it looks like that. Only there's 700 stumps out there right now that are still there that we haven't had time to grind yet because we've been busy cutting trees down. So a lot of people don't like looking at those and some of you might have a stump by your house and I'm sorry, but we're doing what we can and a stump in my opinion is safer than a standing dead tree. So that's a justification of it. But hopefully we get the rest of those 2000 ash trees down and then we can get back to the stumps. Replanting is another big question I get. This year we did have some grant money and some things help us out. Some of that was from the Roots organization and we were able to plant 540 trees and there's an inventory map, some of those trees in the north, near north neighborhood, you can see those are the locations of some of them. There's a picture there of one. My goal is to continue to replant at maybe 100 or 200 trees a year going forward. A question in the gray. What 10 trees are your replacing? Yeah, great question. So Tony had mentioned the problem with diversity and that's a big thing for me. I mean, he mentioned 10, you want 10% at a genius level at the most and really I'd like to see it less than that, like 5% right now we have way too many maples as he mentioned. So I don't recommend planting any maples. I mean, there's enough people planting maples that I don't need to plant maples between the street and the sidewalk. It seems like everybody wants to plant a maple. Maybe that's the only tree that they know or they like but I don't really go for planting maples and we have a lot of linens or American basswoods so we don't need to plant any more of those either. But as far as what we are planting, Ginkgo is a good one. Kentucky Coffee Tree, Hackberry, yeah, London Plain trees is a good one. The oak? Yeah, so oaks, I'm avoiding the red oak family just because they're more prone to Dutch oak wilt but swamp white oak trees and bur oak trees we're planting. The smaller trees, so a lot of these ash trees that were cutting down, they're so big for wherever they were planted or they were under power lines, I'm not gonna replace it with another large tree. So the big thing is finding small trees to plant that can handle salt damage. So we're kind of limited but one thing is a tree lilac, they only get about as tall as this ceiling here. So red bug we're experimenting with, planting some serviceberry, some pear, some kind of medium trees. There's some honey locust varieties that only get like 30 or 40 feet tall. We're planting some of those. There's some big tree down. Yeah, there's plenty of elm trees we're planting that are resistant or different from different countries that don't get Dutch elm disease. So yeah, I mean really it's a long catalog of trees and what they can tolerate and how big they grow that I look at. And then once you figure out what you want, then you look at the nurseries and see what they have and then your list kind of dwindles but then you kind of go off what's available because everybody's fighting for trees nowadays because all these trees are dying. So it's really, and the nurseries can grow stuff for you so if you're willing to wait, you can contract, grow or you can tell them enough in advance they can get trees for you but they're not cheap either. But yeah, we're doing our best and really my goal is these trees, these five morning we hired these elk because we didn't have the crews to plant them. There was just a ton of trees, we hired them out and it cost a lot of money to hire tree planting. So in the future, I hope to be able to plant in house with their own crews or four guys and myself. That's probably why we're limited to 100 to 200 because I would think we can only spend about a week in the spring and maybe a week in the fall planting and maybe we can get 50 to 100 per week depending but we can buy the trees cheaper and plant them ourselves it's cheaper as a cost that we have to put money out. Map layers. So I love our tree inventory. I'm really a big fan of it. It can do so many things. There's so many different layers. If somebody, like I can look at this map and everything that's blue and said they are means it's ashes getting removed. It hasn't been done yet. There's this black wagon wheel that means there was an old tree planted there that's been removed, it's gone. But I can still click on that and see what, when it was cut down and what was done to it. Like here's another slide. So this is an ash tree. It tells me it's an ash. It's good. Condition. It tells me how big it is. And then if I click on the work orders it says it was treated June 12th of 2017. So everything's in this system for us for every tree. So it's really quite impressive I think. And it helps me manage the trees a ton. I guess, yeah I guess this didn't, the slides I handed you were a little different. Somehow it didn't transfer. But I'll go over a couple of these other things I wanted to mention. So we take care of the trees between the street and sidewalk and the parks. And a lot of people might call me and say, ooh I have this dead tree in my yard between me and my neighbor. And my neighbor doesn't want to help me pay for it or I can't pay for it because I live alone and I don't have money. And really the city can't, I can't help you cut that tree down. And a lot of times I end up telling people no, like it's unfortunate. But there is the other side of things. So then they have to kind of figure it out themselves. But then the other side of things is if they have a tree in their front yard that's over the sidewalk or over the road that's an ash that's dying. It could be any tree. But an ash is what we're talking about. It's really considered a public nuisance because it's a dangerous tree. It's dead, it could fall on anybody walking by, it could fall and block the road. So really it's my job to enforce them to remove those trees. And if they don't then I would hire it out and bill them for it basically. It's better, it's cheaper for them to do it themselves because if I have to hire it out then I charge them not only with the contractor we're charged and I charge them a processing fee and then I find them and everything, so. So there's- Does Holmer's insurance ever cover that? Do we have this tree after it's a nuisance? I think it's per insurance. I know my sister lives in West Bend and she has an ash tree and it fell on her house and her insurance only covered $250. So it wasn't much. Luckily she had a brother that knew what he was doing. So it worked out, but. For the tree itself notwithstanding the damage to the house. The damage for a house, well, yeah, it didn't damage it that much, but they only paid $250. I don't think they would have paid, I don't know for sure. But I think it's per- They were paid to have one removed because it's high. No, I don't believe so. Yeah, I'm not an insurance guy but I wouldn't think they would. It's not a fault, not a fault. Yeah, so I mean if a private tree falls in the street it will come clear the street. And we'll leave it up to our crews whether or not to put all the wood on your front yard or if it's easier for us just to chip it, then we'll do that. We'll do what's easiest for us, not to help the homeowner out. But it's really, it's your tree if it falls, but it's our road to maintain so we have to keep it clear and safe. So we'll leave that up to us. But the ordinances are there to help me the nuisance to define what a nuisance a tree is and then to go ahead and define what needs to happen if the nuisance is there and I'm aware of it and make everybody aware of it. And then there's a guideline, I'll send them a letter giving them 30 days or 60 days or whatever I determine is appropriate to for them to obey that nuisance that whether it's cutting it down or maybe if it's a different kind of tree maybe the only is half of it or trim half of it or something like that. Do you have a question? Yeah, so if the city identifies a tree that's got some branches that are now a nuisance, are you taking down the whole tree or just the part that's a nuisance? Yeah, good question. So if it's an ash tree, I would say take the whole tree unless they're treating it and keeping it alive. But really I can only enforce if it's gonna interfere with the public right away. So it's similar to a property line where the property line goes up to the heavens according to the law. Kind of, like if they have an ash tree that's dead and it can fall and reach the sidewalk then I could tell them that they need to cut the whole tree down or at least. Yeah, I mean I could. If I think, if I believe it can interfere with the public right away then they have to listen to what I tell them. But if it's just like a lot of times it's just maples or linens that are growing low and I'll say oh it needs to be eight feet as the ordinance over the sidewalk then they just have to cut those branches off to get that clearance. Is that the answer to your question? Yeah, you mentioned treating and but you didn't really say the effectiveness of treatment, what is the percentage if I have, I live up in Black River have quite a few ash trees. Yeah. And we've treated them but I'm wondering what is the chance that that's gonna be effective? Great question and Bob might touch more on that but from the trees I've treated over the years that it's very effective as long as it's done early enough. Like my sister's tree that I mentioned that part of it fell on her house. I've been treating that tree and that's the longest tree I've been treating for six years now and it's still fine. It loses some limbs because it's huge but there's other trees as long as you're treating them early enough to stop, it's kind of a preventative. So you're not gonna come in there and get rid of the bug and make the tree healthier. You're just gonna stop future damage. So if you're treated late and it's already damaged it's gonna stay damaged and maybe that damage will continue to not look good. How often do you have to treat? So it's labeled for every two years. Now the city decided to try a three-year process. A lot of cities are doing that just because I mean we can afford to lose a few if we need to based on budget. But if it was my tree, which I have four trees that I've treated on my own property, I treated them every two years because I care about them. I don't want to take the chance. In the back there, in the blue, I think. Well I have a little bit of experience with it. I live about a mile and a half to the west which is working on 9.48 and I have six ash trees of two different species. They're between 18 and 30 inch DBH and I first treated them in 2016 and I noticed the next year all six of them never looked as good as they did in 2017. And then I retreated in 2018. I had the guy come over just because I noticed something on one of the ash trees and he told me it wasn't general ash or it was actually woodcurdling. And as we were standing off the driveway, one of the ash trees that I have, one of the bigger ones, he said, well a lot of times you can see dead ash bugs underneath the tree and sure enough we looked on the asphalt and within a minute I picked up 10 dead emerald ash peels and this was the year of the summer after I had kind of a treat. So I've been having pretty good success. It's not inexpensive but it's six big trees that shave my yard. Yeah, it's definitely not cheap. I didn't touch on the cost but the city, for those 800 trees that I treated this year, we spent $37,000 on product to treat those. My six are about $500 every few years. Yeah, yep and really it depends on who you get to do it, what rate they're using and what they're using. And I know a few people out there that treat and it's kind of a range there. So every person that treats might not do it the same exact way and use the same rate so. Is that per tree? No, that's 500 every two years. Yeah, I just, as a city I don't recommend anybody really but I'll say I recommend choosing a certified arborist, somebody that has some school and some background, probably a little more trustworthy. Yeah, a pesticide license too, right? Yeah, if you're doing it for hire you need to have a pesticide license. So you yourself could treat your own trees without a license. You could go buy that stuff and buy that equipment and do it yourself. I mean it would cost you a couple thousand to get started but if you're hiring somebody they need a pesticide license to do it. Even with the mechanical method you use with the bicycle pump? Yep. Costs a thousand dollars for that equipment? Yeah, that one bucket that I had. Let me show it, we go back to that. Oh, here's one. The bucket in that system is $1,300 and the bike pump is probably, that's not a good one but the good ones I have now is 100. So, well the drill but that system is $1,300. What's the price of pesticide for $1,000 per liter? $500 roughly per liter, yeah. So you could buy that and a bottle for about 2,000 if you had a drill. And then you could technically treat your own tree but you just have to know how to do it. I mean, you could probably find a video on that. Yeah, it's gotta be the right day, the tree's gotta be the right place. Yeah, I mean, most people don't but originally the insecticide was restricted use so you did need them and there is still some that are restricted use but what I use is not restricted use. So meaning anybody can buy it. They still gotta, should be careful. And the pesticide course is actually pretty easy to go through and really knowledgeable so. But this particular chemical is the proven chemical. Yeah, yeah. I mean, from what I can read online and there's all sorts of different chemicals but I don't know how good any LMR versus the other. There's some that you can, you make a little dammer on the tree and you make a bucket full and you pour it around the tree, I guess. But again, I don't know how effective. Bob will touch on that for sure I think but what I stressed earlier was the MMectin benzoate was the ingredient that's in the trunk injection products and that in my opinion is way better than the soil applied to stuff which is typically a metacloprid as an active ingredient. Not to say that doesn't work but I trust the MMectin benzoate more. And Bob will touch more on that for sure. Yeah, it's a trade name for that triage. Yeah, great question. So triage is one of the trade names for one of the MMectin benzoate products. I use, I use, well it was originally I started using triage back in the day and then another product came out at Arbor Mectin. I use that and now the city uses Mectinite but they're all basically the same active ingredient percentages. There's some other names out there too. In the back there. So what's the life cycle of the insect like where after you've treated all these trees and the infected pastries that are around you all die is the organism back in or is there any kind of like a safe zone where you, like if you found your tree to live for 10 years as the disease has moved on out of the area. Yeah, so in Michigan where it started before us all the astries are dead unless they've been treated and even new ones that are coming up and growing are, they're still dying from Emerald Ashbore. So there's still some insects around but the thought was there's probably less stuff that maybe you could go for a longer period of time without treating. But I'm sure the numbers aren't as high but there's still, from what I've heard in those areas there's still residual insects around. So it might, it's gonna be probably an ongoing thing. I mean even now there's American elm trees that grow in the woods all over the place and they get Dutch elm disease after so many years and that's been since the 50s when that was around. So and that's gonna continue with astries. They're gonna keep growing and dying. I'm sure I'm hopeful that like the elm maybe they'll come, nurseries will come up with some resistant or some varieties or ash that we can plant but right now I'm not really sure on that in the front here. So Maywood is the city property, is it not? Is that part of your responsibility? Well, I have treated three trees on the Maywood property in the parking lot but the rest of them we haven't treated. And you're gonna just let them, let nature take the score. Well, we live four houses away along the Pigeon River and probably have eight, 50 to 70 foot ashes probably 40 little ones on there. So what's your opinion for the future of our trees? Well, the ash trees are, if they're untreated, they will die for sure. And they're showing signs, some of the top branches are dying and coming off and stuff, does that mean it's too late to treat them or treat them at any stage? No, yeah, so the damage that's done won't come back. Well, I understand that. At a certain point, are you not going to save the tree? Yeah, I mean, I do some treating on the side and I'll tell people, no, I can't treat that tree, it's too dark on. Okay. You know, I'll be honest with them because I'll just, you know, in my experience, or I'll say all of that tree may only have like a 30% chance of making or something like that and then leave it up to them if they wanna try. Do you do assessment on the side also? Just like you said, you do some treating on the side, but if we were to have you come and look at our property and give us a general assessment? Yeah, I mean. Is that something you do? I could dabble in it, I would say. I'm not, I'm not, I have busy enough the way it is. So I, even myself, I don't really advertise at all. Okay. So maybe, you know, but really, it's part of my job as the forester, if somebody has a concern to assess their trees, even if they're private trees. Okay. So I could, I don't know if you're in the city or not, I forget. Well, no, we're in the town of Sheboygan, but we're 150 yards away from where we're sitting right now. And, you know, all along the Pigeon River, the percentage of ash trees in there is probably more like 60% in most of the dense woods out there and a lot, a lot of, you know, little tiny ones along this river. Yeah, I'm sure Bob and Hoppy Tree Service might be a better option to reach out to. Okay. Because that's what they do professionally and consult and give advice and do things like that. But yeah, I limit myself back there in the back. Two questions. One, is the city relative to the trees you're having to take down? Is this other than chipping? Does the city come up with any creative use at all for the wood and benches for the parks or anything of that nature? And then secondly, is the city thinking at all about serving its own nursery? Great question. So number one, is the, what are you doing with the wood? Basically just chipping it and getting rid of the logs as best we can by people who want, or there's some people who take it for firewood that we deliver it to really, because we can't be liable for people coming in and cutting their own wood. So we're basically just getting rid of the wood, not really using it for anything. And we are using a lot of the, the wood chip, we'll grind a lot of the wood chips, the ash, we'll keep them separate and use them in our cemeteries for mulch. So instead of having to buy mulch, we've been using kind of re-purposing them that way. So it's not like we're just wasting them, but we're using that. And then your second question. Oh, nursery, are you talking about nursery? Yeah, so, no, we've thought about it, but we don't really have the skills to do a nursery ourselves. There are some communities that have gravel bed type planting areas, and I've been thinking about maybe introducing that to the city, but no plants at this time. But that's kind of where we can grow our own trees for a cheaper rate, buying real tiny grown ones and gravel and then plant them ourselves. But that's, we'd have to build that system and it's not gonna happen any time soon, but potentially maybe in the future we might do that. Does the treatment have to occur at a certain time of year, like spring only or fall only or whatever? Great question. So the timing of the application, when the leaves are green, that's what I go by, when they're both and they're green. So right now is really the end of it. Like there might be still, it might still go in. It might see if you still find a green one, if the leaves are all yellow and falling off, it won't go in. Because at least with my system, my system that I use, the tree has to suck it up. The bike pump gets it there, the tree takes it in. So I, and I have treated trees that are late that people wanted to try anyway and it didn't go in. It was like, ah, too late. You know, we'll have to do it next year. Good. Question there? Yeah, do you have any insight as to why this boring insect only attacks ash trees? Yeah, I get that question every time. And why does the ash poor only attack ash trees? Is the question. And really, I think it's just, that's what it is. That's it's food. There's, as far as why it does, I don't have an answer. I mean, there's other insects like the bronze birch borer that only focus on birch trees. And there's, so the emerald ash borer is an ash tree. It feeds on ash trees. So that's really the only answer I can tell you. It's like the monitor up here is over the tree. Yeah, let's just. Well, what did you design the question there? Any kind of research that trees give off in order of their pheromones? Pheromones. Is there a way that she can trick the bugs by injecting something in the tree that would develop an insect? I mean, this is probably what we'll be on but the city can do, but I'm just kind of curious if there's any kind of research done. Yeah, so not that I'm really aware of. I mean, the insects that we inject, it kills the insects that feed on the tree. It doesn't repel insects. So every year, more emerald ash borer are gonna land on that tree and lay their eggs. And then when they hatch, they're gonna start feeding and end up gonna die because they eat some of that insect to set. As far as something that tricks the tree to do a pheromone or repel the insects, I think there's research going on about it right now. I've heard rumors about like maybe trying to do some sort of growth regulator in the tree to trigger like a response from the tree. But that's just research now and that's all I really know about it. So it's not anything that I've been seen documented or anything. I think we'll have to let it go over to Bob now. Okay, my name is Bob Gluck and I also am a state certified arborist. I was, I hate to age myself, but I was in the very first group in Wisconsin to become certified. So for 30 years, I live in Sheboygan County and for 30 years, I ran my own business servicing Sheboygan County and specifically in plant health care. That's my strength. And four years ago, Hoppy Tree Service bought my business because of my strength in plant health care and my 30 years of clients that I had built up. So I am currently under contract with Hoppy Tree Service. Their billing office again is in Milwaukee, but I live in Random Lake and their equipment and such is kept in Grafton address but it's really right on the Grafton Port Washington line. So for them to come to Sheboygan, it's actually quicker than me because I live west of Random Lake. So that's my background. I pretty much spend my days consulting on ash trees and treatments as well as other problems. So I will not address any city things. I'm gonna let that up to the city foresters. So I, and I do not do anything with the cities. It's just all private people. So since about 99 or 2000 when the insect was discovered in Detroit, I have started treating trees. That was the year I started treating mine on my property and I used emidicloprid, which Tim talked about with the soil drench. As soon as I knew there was something better, I did switch over and right now we are using arbamectin. We did use the triage before that. It's the same like Tim said. It's the same thing, emimectin benzoate. I will tell you if you are using emidicloprid, in my opinion, and I've got all kinds of cases that is no longer working by itself. It is no longer working by itself. The only reliable way right now because of the pressure from the insects is to go with a direct trunk injection like the city is doing. And we pretty much 100% for ash trees use the trunk injection. We still use emidicloprid for many other things but not for ash trees. The other thing with the ash trees is the treatment itself, please keep in mind, is an insecticide. It's not a disease, it's an insecticide and it only kills the insect, the feeding larvae. And earlier in the year like Tim kind of alluded to that they begin to feed, the smaller they are and so consequently the easier they die. So timing in that if the insecticide is in the tree and the eggs are just starting to hatch and now they're feeding, they're tiny, they're tiny and they're gonna die better or quicker than after they've been growing for four instars and they're probably big like in those up arc. Yeah. How do you count? They could get some insecticide that way, the adult feeds on the leaves. So my assumption with that case is that these adults were feeding on the leaves and they got the insecticide and fell. Also keep in mind that there are at least four or five or six lookalikes to the emerald ash borer, especially adults that are native to Wisconsin. So just because you see a green metallic bug there are many lookalikes. Okay, so the other thing is that this is strictly an insecticide that kills the insect. It doesn't really in my opinion do anything for tree health. Okay, it's like in my observation people that might become very sick and they take some medication to get well, well if you're not gonna eat well and take care of yourself, getting rid of the sickness really didn't help you. So you have to maintain tree health. These trees, ash trees are kind of particular as far as nutrients and things like that they naturally self prune, there's lots of dead wood in them typically, that's not necessarily emerald ash borer causing that. So if you see a branch that's on the bottom part of the tree and I get this every single day, I saw a dead branch, well that may not necessarily be emerald ash borer. I know I've got limited time and Mr. Fezler wanted me to talk a little bit about cost. The cost again is dependent like Tim alluded to with the rate and how much we're using. What determines the rate? It really is determined, it's my call when I'm on site, the more under stress the tree is, the higher the rate I wanna probably put in there. So the other thing to keep in mind is that if you haven't been treating and you're calling now because your tree is half dead and you wanna save it, that percentage, and I'm like Tim, I give a percent has only got a small percent. If you wanna try it and roll the dice, that's fine, but it's gonna have a smaller percent chance of survival than one that's healthy and you're treating it. Cost wise, we charge anywheres from $8 to $12 per diameter inch. That's the DBH measurement at four and a half feet. Also, quantity can play into that as well. Not only condition but quantity. You know, if we're treating 10 trees on your property, it's usually a little bit cheaper than one. Removal as well? Pardon me? Is it removal? Yes, so removals. The insect feeds from the top of the tree down, okay? So what happens with the tree is it's still taking up water and nutrients all through this years of feeding. One to two years before we ever even see any damage these insects are feeding. And keep in mind those pictures that were shown one to two years. In between there starts another cycle of one to two years and so you've got that all ricocheting up there. So anyhow, they feed from the top down. The tops become very brittle as everybody talked about and everybody knows now. They become very brittle because of this girdling that's going on right underneath the cambium like those bark pieces show. So as far as a removal is concerned, we right now, we've got 10 crews, four people on a crew, and we are booked out well past January for removals. Part of the reason is is because we no longer trust ash trees that have been dead for any length of time to put a climber up in them, okay? So we have got multiple size track lifts that can get into a gate and get in people's backyards to start to disassemble these trees. Today we were doing a job in Plymouth. We've got what's called a mech truck. It's a completely remote controlled truck that can reach a hundred feet up in the air and clamp the tree and there's a saw underneath that cuts it and takes it down that way. It's huge. It's huge. It's not gonna fit in. It's not gonna fit probably in 99% in backyards. It's great for trees along a driveway, trees in the front yard, municipalities perhaps. I've got a huge number of clients in Port Washington by what used to be the Squires golf course down in there and we park it on the road, we shut down the road and we pick with that. But it's extremely fast because it can handle big trunks and it's all remote controlled. So did that kind of answer your question about the removal? Well, yeah, but like I said, we've got probably four that are over 30 that are just little, you know, little ones. But they're already falling and I know. And, yeah, we need to, we need to, that's what we got to do going forward. We're experimenting a little bit with, I'm gonna say drop cratching, which is a term to reduce the height of a tree where you sometimes a tree has grown out of its space and we wanna make it smaller so we drop crotch it, which means cutting it down to the next union or branch. So we are experimenting a little bit with that with cutting the tops, these dead tops out of some for some people that are extremely sensitive and don't wanna lose their tree. So we are toying a little bit with that and playing around with that a little bit as perhaps an option. And then of course a treatment, cause if you're still not gonna treat, then you're not gonna save any part of it. So again, getting on top of things early is key. Don't wait until it's half, you know, half or more dead. You know, even a little bit of dead on top, your percentage is going way down. The other problem that nobody talked about here is the marshaling of all this product and what are municipalities and what are private people? Maybe a homeowner with one tree or six trees, it may not be a big deal, but maybe a farmer or somebody that's got a wood lot, you know, what are they gonna do with all this wood? So that's becoming a major issue. Somebody asked a question before about utilizing the wood. Hoppy Tree Service has a mill. They've got three kilns in that grafting facility and they actually do use a lot of the ash wood. We make a lot of things for private homeowners. The project we were working on in Plymouth today, they're having us make benches out of the ash, steel legs and a back and so on out of the half logs. Ash is to me a beautiful wood. It's got great grain. The insect really doesn't affect the wood quality at all as far as the grain and the staining and all that. So baseball bats are made out of ash. It's a strong wood. Yeah, the brittleness is more of the branches breaking off. It's not in the wood itself. I have yet to see trees that have completely 100% tipped out of the ground from emerald ash borer. To me, that tree that tips out of the ground is tipping because of some other reason. I have a feeling it's too saturated there. It's too heavy, the wind is blowing or something. It's not tipping because of emerald ash borer. In my opinion, okay? The brittleness is from the canopy falling and breaking apart and that's the hazard that Tim talks about. It's that's the hazardous part and that's why we're not sending climbers up in those anymore. If you think of the elm trees that died back in the 60 or elm trees that died three years ago out in a field perhaps, they're dead and they remain skeletons for years out there. You can see them. They don't fall apart like these ash trees do. The other thing that people, somebody asked about was some interval of treatments. The label is for two years. Detroit is, it has gone to three years but it's very cut and dried there. Like Tim said, it's black and white. The trees either died or they were treated and that's the way it'll be here. They're either dead or treated. Elm trees, Tim alluded to it too. We've got multiple clients that have elm trees but they are treating those elm trees every three years for Dutch elm disease. They love their tree and elms are beautiful. So I think that's what's gonna happen to the ash. If you've got a big ash tree in your yard and you like it, it's providing all these figures that Mr. Fesler talked about with the value to your property and the air conditioning and blah, blah, blah. You're gonna have to continue to treat that, I'm afraid. Now I do think we're gonna go to three years at some point but we're here, we're not there in my opinion. We're not anywhere close to that yet. The other thing I'm telling people with treatments, if you've got a lot of trees on your property and I don't know what the definition of a lot is, for some people it's two, for others it's six or eight, the treatment is for two years and what it's really doing, really doing, it's not, it is saving the tree but it is buying you two years worth of time to decide what you're gonna do in two years or maybe to save the money to have the tree removed or save the money for a replacement is buying you two years of time and then you need to think again what you're gonna do. Right. Because if Tim had to get rid of all 5,000 trees in one year, see we'd be bankrupt. So it's really buying people time by treating trees and just kind of staggering it through time because eventually you're gonna have to replace the trees unless you want to treat it forever. Right. Mr. Feseler's got an awesome example. He lives in a very wooded yard with a lot of ash trees. A lot of ash trees and we've been treating some to buy him some time, we've taken some out and then we've replaced some, not with ash, with other things. So he's gonna do that for a long time, a continual rotation, you know, or just leave them and they'll die. I'm still hoping for a discount, Bob. No, no, no, no, I haven't got that. What about smaller ash, the 12-inch diameter? Is it better to just take them down while they're easy to take down and put something else in there? Because if you let them grow, eventually you're gonna have to treat them. Yes. You know, unless it's, you know, I get into situations all the time too where somebody had passed and, you know, they gave this memorial, ash trees were great trees a number of years ago. They were great, they're hardwood, you know, bats are made out of them. You know, they can stand flooding and water and dry and all this stuff. So I, you know, they were given a lot for memorial trees and what have you and in that case, you know, when they're sentimental, things like that, I treat them. But long term, take them down and replant, yeah. Yeah, the River Valley out here is full of ash trees, unmanaged and there's some big ash trees in there and they're propagated and there's thickly total ones. And they're a heavy cedar and some years more than others, especially green ash is a real heavy cedar. It's like Model Land 4, my F1, 70% ash. Yeah. That's a very typical ash ecosystem type of Model Land 4. You're finding ash, but we're the 70, 80%? Yeah, I just know that a friend cut down the point for me as a large size ash and a third of an acre of it. So I guess, if there's any good thing that happened with this, I try and look at the glass being half full. There's always been lots of cultivars if you went online or before the online days you got seed catalogs and you saw these cool trees. The problem back then was always were they available? Where can I get something like that other than a little tiny stick that they send through the mail? So kind of the good thing about this is nurseries used to sell a lot of ash trees and they made money selling ash trees. Well today, they are selling zero ash trees and if they wanna stay in business, they had to start propagating these London Plain Trees, the Hack Berries and Ivory Silk Tree Lilocks, all that stuff. So new cultivars of things and new species of things are a little bit more readily available now because of the emerald ash borer in my opinion. I guess, so again, a little bit on that removal thing. I think your removal costs are gonna continue to rise if you delay the removal because now you're becoming, again, more brittle, more fragile, especially if, again, you gotta think of accessibility and how you're gonna do this. If you're hiring a company that says they'll climb, climb up a tree that's been dead for a couple years, I'd be nervous. A little bit on that. Yeah, yeah, right, right. Is there anything else you wanted me to touch on? No, I mean, I guess you talked a little bit about cost of removal, Bob. Okay. You gave folks sort of an idea of what they're looking at. Like 70 foot ash tree. Yeah, maybe some examples of what. And it's on the hillside. What about trunk diameter? You can't really go by trunk diameter because a 10 inch tree that's over his house is gonna cost a lot more to take down than a 10 inch tree that's out in your open field to take down. So it really depends. I would say you are looking at a minimum of $400 and we've already taken them down to where they're $2,500, $2,800 because they're in a tight, tight situation. We had to get some special type of equipment in there. Had to rig everything down. So $400 to $3,000, I guess. And then depending on what you want with the wood, what you want, clean up and things like that. Take down trees safely. The only, yes, I'm not gonna argue that, but also keep in mind, a company like mine or a company like Hoppy has been around for three generations. And people always said to me the entire time that I owned my business, when there was a storm coming, they were like, man, I bet you are so happy there's a storm coming, you are gonna make money galore. And I would be just the opposite. I would hate storms to come through because if you're not taking care of things and running a business for the times when there's not a storm, I think you're doing something wrong. And so, quite frankly, the pressure for like us to get these trees taken down that clients want us to take down and maintain the crab apples for scab, the girdling roots on the maples. This year I've seen more verticillium wilt on maples, all kinds of stuff. That's what we're trying to maintain trees. If you're in it just for the removal, that's gonna come to an end at some point. Not sure when, but it will come to an end. They're gonna get all their trees taken down at some point. It's called ash flower gall. It's on ash. It's caused from a mite that's feeding in there. A mite is, it's in the spider family because it's got eight legs, okay? So it's not in the insect family either. So an insecticide for a mite will not work. It's gotta be a miteicide. But that's what that is. So that growth, that's a crippled growth from that mite feeding on there when that leaf was in the process of opening up. The treatment that we do, this emomectin benzoate helps with the control of that too. It also helps with the clearwing bor, which is a native bor pest that ash trees got way before emerald ash bor. Yeah. I want to hire your company to do a treatment. Well, I can give you one of my cards, the office numbers on there. You can call the office, my cell phone's on there. You can call the cell phone, you can email me. Like Tim said, we are borderline right now. Monday they were still taking it up. Monday we were still injecting. Now I didn't talk to Brad who does our plan healthcare, what they were doing yesterday and today. But we are pretty much on a day to day basis right now. Sure, yeah, I'll come out and measure them and get you a price. And the spring is a busy time of the year. That's when we're doing tons of stuff. Well, I guess Tim can talk too. The regulation used to be that you had to have a chipper that would chip the mulch into no bigger than a one inch by one inch cube or whatever dimension you want to measure it, but no bigger than one inch. And the reason that was even if it didn't cut a larvae, it would dry out in there. I think right now the insect is so widespread that if he's taking down a tree on the north side of Sheboygan and you live on the south side and you want to use this mulch, it's not gonna matter whether there's a live boar in there or not. Yeah. Carrier, carrying it. Well, I think there still is a ban. How effective it is, in my opinion, I'm not sure how effective it is. Yeah, do you have an answer? Okay. It's like for state parks, there's a real concern that the state parks, again, comes down to resources. They don't want that as a big part of why that ban is. I mean, if you're taking it from one farm to another farm, it doesn't matter. Certainly from Sheboygan to Maddowall County, it doesn't matter much anymore. I mean, they're quarantined, both counties are. But it's really, I think, natural areas that are high priority natural areas that are probably the concern there. We were up in the UP this summer and they were expecting firewood. We can't ground it up there. They have got it, you know, the local area and they would inspect it, you know? That's good. Now it has, I heard, that it has hopped to Mississippi and it's in the Twin Cities. I think your map is about a year old. No, I don't think burning it. I think it's the physical moving it from here to here and now they get out of there, out of that chunk and flying lay eggs on a living tree. Yeah, I get asked that a lot and number one, it doesn't kill the lawn because it's an insecticide, it's not a herbicide. So it would not, you could spray, well, you don't spray it, you inject it, but if you were spraying a crab apple, for example, for scab and there's perennials and such underneath there, in that case it's a fungicide or maybe an insecticide and if you're hiring a company that's going by the books and it's legal, I wouldn't worry about it. I really wouldn't. I think the label says to not use it for like in your compost pile, like something you're gonna actually potentially grow food on and consume, but as far as that goes, that's it. I think that's what the label said on it, but I wouldn't be too worried about it. And if it's broken down and not effective in two to three years in the tree, my guess would be is that it's gonna be the same, whether it's in the compost pile or on the leaf or maybe sooner because it's exposed more too. You did it yourself or a company? I did it five years ago. Pardon me? I did it five years ago. Five years ago? I did it five years ago. Oh, they did triage, okay. Well, that's good. Yeah, that's great. Oh, well, five years is too big of an interval. Every three years. Yeah, see, I don't recommend that. We're too early on that curve that Mr. Fezler showed. We're too early on that curve, in my opinion. The city's got limited resources, you know. So we can absorb that. I'd be more concerned about what rate they use. Yeah. I don't know if they would say that or if we see. Legally, they're supposed to tell you the rate they use? Yeah, and we just get them to pay for it. And treat it, and now I'm also, yeah. That's what I would be concerned about because if you started that soon, in my experience, it should have been working. What about you, Bob? Yep, I was just thinking. I know who did hit their treatments, too. No. So. Hope they wasn't happy. No, no. Because we don't do three years. Right. Yeah, yeah, I agree. You know, I think it's just been in the last number of years that Detroit has gone to that three-year thing. And I'm sure there's people, private people, that might still be doing two years out there. I don't know every case. Yep, you can do one year. You can do a lower dosage and do it every year. My concern with that is now you're drilling into the tree every year. If you're doing maybe triage or one of these every two years, and then in between doing the metacloprid, there'd be nothing wrong with that. Sure, yeah, I think we're wrapping it up anyhow. Any other questions? Good. We are wrapping up. You'll be happy to know. I said we'd get you over here by seven. Just a couple of things, I guess. First of all, there's some literature on the back bench. If you haven't picked this up, this is a brochure on Roots and what we're trying to do. It also contains our website. And since those folks that are watching on TV, our website is www.RootsWI.org. www.RootsWI.org. There'll be information in there. I guess if I could leave you with a couple of thoughts at the end of the evening. First of all, we appreciate what Maywood has done and once again, allowing us to use their wonderful facility out here to do this workshop. We will continue in our best efforts through LNRP and Rotary and the Roots organization to try to provide as much public education as we can. We would ask any of you that are either listening on channel eight or those of you who are with us this evening to help us frankly just plain spread the word about what is going on with this infestation. Quite frankly, the average person you talk to in the area doesn't understand much about this and we're trying to get the public concerned. The media is starting, I think, to focus on this and we appreciate what channel eight is doing this evening. But the more people that understand this and can cope with it, I think the better it will be. I'm actually a big defender of the city of Sheboygan and the county and the DNR. Sometimes I hear criticism that the government is simply not doing enough here. The government, folks, is overwhelmed by this problem. It's a massive infestation. It's not gonna go away. There is no silver bullet, if I may use that term. Government is redirecting resources as best they can. But the city and the county have to continue to plow snow and provide police and fire protection to all the things that municipalities do. They can dedicate a certain number of resources to this and I'm convinced that the city, the county, and the DNR are dedicating considerable resource to this problem. But what we need to do is engage the private sector in trying to help with this thing financially and by spreading the word and information. So for those of you listening this evening or with us who can help us spread this information, we would ask you to do so. The DNR has wonderful resources out there in terms of information. Our website will lead you to some of that information if you wanna know more. We hope as an organization we're helping to spread this information in the city and the county as well. And last but not least, for those of us who are, I think, proud of where we live here in the city and in the county and in our townships, we are hoping, I think, to take Sheboygan and Sheboygan County as really an example of what might be done to engage private and public sector support for the battle against this. We enjoy the environment we have here. We're proud of where we live, but it's going to take an all hands effort to get out and deal with this. So we just invite your participation and active engagement. Talk about this issue so that we get the public involved. This is a multi-year effort that we're involved in to save important environmental resources that we have. Thank you all for coming. Those of you listening on channel eight, thank you for tuning us in. I hope you haven't turned this off. I think it's an interesting issue and you'll hear more from us. Thanks so very much.