City Foresters Resume Fight Against Emerald Ash Borer

With spring’s arrival, cities around the state are ramping up their battle against the emerald ash borer by injecting ash trees with insecticide or cutting the trees down.

City foresters generally agree that the destructive emerald ash borer has established itself in Wisconsin. It turned up in Madison just last November.

“We’ve got about 21,000 ash trees on the city terraces alone – that’s the area between the sidewalk and the curb,” said Charlie Romines, operations manager for the city’s parks department.

He says that about 12,500 trees that are in good condition will be treated with chemical injections. “For the other 8,500 that are under 10 inches, under primary power lines, or otherwise rated in poor condition, we’ll be removing those over the next six years,” he said.

Romines says it will strain his department’s budget to cut down what he estimates will be an extra 1,100 trees each year.

The ash borer was found in Green Bay in 2009, and the city forester feels the pain there too. Mark Freberg says Green Bay has 9,000 city-owned ash trees. He says crews are now concentrating on downtown neighborhoods, near where the insect was first found.

He says one way to tell if a tree may be infested is woodpeckers. “Somehow the woodpeckers, they know the larvae are in there and they’re hammering away on the tree trying to get a meal out of it,” he said. “So when the guys are looking for woodpecker activity they’re pretty accurate at it.”

Freberg says most ash trees will be turned into wood chips. Large trees that are in good condition will be made into park benches and picnic tables.