With an eye on safety as well as aesthetics, New Canaan will spend about $38,000 to prune trees around the playgrounds and perimeters of the public schools.
The Board of Selectmen unanimously approved those funds during its regular meeting Tuesday, part of an overall allocation of $74,913 at the request of Tree Warden (and fourth-generation New Canaanite) Bruce Pauley.
Pauley said he’s wanted to get to the schools “for a couple of years.”
“But I’ve been holding back and I guess it’s just somewhat gun shy fro the amount of trees that have been coming down after all the storms but we are getting to the point now where can start concentrating on pruning which is where I wanted to be when I first started the job,” Pauley said during the selectmen’s meeting, held in the Training Room at the New Canaan Police Department, “Deputy Tree Warden” Bheema (“I post the trees, he marks ‘em”), his German Shepherd dog, at his side.
The work will be done by two different tree service companies—Almstead and Qualey—in party, Pauley said, because he’d like to see the work done in a timely fashion.
“I want to see it done before the leaves come up, it’s a cleaner job that way,” he said.
Selectman Beth Jones asked about a $16,195 allocation for tree pruning work at Irwin Park. Pauley said that job had been put out to bid three years ago with the idea that whichever company won it would come back and continue, “because they [trees at Irwin] had been pruned very poorly in the past and we’re trying to correct them and get them into a more natural state.”
Many town-owned crabapple and apple trees had been pruned back to their knobs, Pauley said, which is “just poor pruning practice.”
“It is just not right, the trees do not look normal, it’s not particularly healthy for them, so we want to return them over time to their natural state.”