The City of Revelstoke is looking at filing a report with police after two maple trees on city property were improperly and illegally pruned, resulting in the city cutting them down.
“I’ve caught up with the management team here and we are going to file a with report to the police,” said Mike Thomas, the city’s director of engineering. “If the damage is over $1,000, there could be a charge of mischief.”
The trees in question are located in the small park overlooking the river near the community centre. The trees had their branches lopped off by a resident without permission and as a result of the damage, the city chopped them down completely.
Photos: The trees, after they were cut down.
Jeff Hill, the city’s acting foreman, said the trees were “mutilated” and would have died within a few years.
“It’s called tree topping and it’s a very bad practice. You see a lot of people do it around town here. It allows for a lot more disease to get into the trees, and it just doesn’t look good ultimately,” he told the Review. “The reason we took them is mainly because they were pretty ugly, but it’s also a bad practice and as the city, we don’t want to show we do bad practices.”
Hill said the city was looking to replace the trees.
“Ideally we’d want to replace them with maple trees because that’s what was there before,” he said.
The Review knows the identity of one of the people who topped the trees but was not able to reach them for comment after learning the city was going to file a police report. We decided to not publish their name until they had a chance to speak us.
Photo: One of the trees in question can be seen at the left of this 2011 picture.