West Windsor will soon be saving both ash trees and money. The township received a $300,000 grant from the state Department of Environmental Protection, which awarded a total of $1.6 million to 32 municipalities to combat the Emerald Ash Borer blight.
There are 1,800 ash trees under the town’s jurisdiction, a total which accounts for nine percent of West West Windsor’s entire street tree inventory. The Shade Tree Commission has determined that only 400 ash trees can be saved via treatment.
The remaining 1,400 trees will ultimately have to be removed, and the $300,000 state grant is earmarked for tree replacement. These figures do not include ash trees located on private property away from the street. The township website has directions to help homeowners save or replace an ash tree.
Commission members Ron Slinn, Paul Pitluk and Susan Holshcer, alongside landscape architect Dan Dobromilsky, detailed their management plan at the Sept. 12 council meeting. Of the 1,400 ash trees that will ultimately be removed, the state grant will go towards removing and replacing 1,300 trees over four years. The town will handle the other 100 trees slated for removal and replacement, as well as the treatment costs for the 400 street trees to be saved.
The state grant will offset more than half the estimated cost of dealing with the EAB problem. Before the arrival of the state grant, the commission designed an eight-year management plan with an annual cost of $62,000 for tree replacement and treatment.
The EAB blight has an eight-year cycle, and Dobromilsky said roughly 50 trees in town have already died. Over time more trees will inevitably die, though one mitigation strategy is to maintain “sacrifice trees” that will hopefully attract EABs away from healthy trees.
The commission has been planning for the EAB since late 2014, and an EAB was first captured last summer. Slinn, the commission chair, said the town is considering smaller “UtiliTrees” as a replacement option. These trees have a smaller chance of coming into contact with utility poles and the roots have a smaller impact on sidewalks.
“One tree we’re thinking of is the Japanese lilac,” Slinn said. “One can be found outside the post office. They bloom in the spring and have a wonderful fragrance, a nice alternative to the ash tree’s fall foilage.”
For those uninterested in the aesthetic value of trees, Dobromilsky also added that trees have proven health, energy reduction and traffic calming benefits.
Slinn, in a letter to the WW-P News, said that the EAB is a parasitic insect that selectively attacks ash trees. Introduced originally into the Midwest from Asia, the insect has now spread to New Jersey and into West Windsor. The adult females lay their eggs under the tree’s bark where their larvae consume the tree’s conductive tissues, effectively strangling it.
The tree will die within a few years if not treated, Slinn said. Proven timely treatments include systemic insecticides, which are most effectively applied by a certified arborist and repeated annually or bi-annually for several years.
“Eradication of EAB is not a practical option,” he said. “Doing nothing to save a threatened tree is implicitly costly since, when the tree eventually dies, it will have to be salvaged and its stump ground or removed.”
Symptoms of EAB attack include canopy die back, emergence of lateral “sucker” branches from the lower tree trunk, woodpeckers seeking the larvae and bark shedding to reveal the “galleried” channels left by the larvae.
Slinn said that the township has started conducting walking surveys to detect new evidence of EAB attack on the ash trees along township streets.
Led by Dobromilsky, members of the Shade Tree Commission working on the survey include Susan Holscher-Calingo and Katie Girandola. The detection efforts are being supplemented by several homeowner associations as well as by the Girl Scouts’ Save-An-Ash-Tree campaign.
Slinn encouraged residents to participate in the effort and to become well informed on the nature of the EAB challenge. More information can be found on the township’s web site at westwindsornj.org.
