The Star - News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area

Residents of Coulee Dam's Ferry Avenue couldn't talk city representatives into alternatives Monday night as officials explained why all of the street's 60- to 70-foot-tall shade trees are going to be cut down.

A sidewalk fix four years in the making is leading to the removal of the trees that have given the neighborhood of 16 homes its distinct feel for decades.

The sidewalk repair will cost about a quarter million dollars, coming from a federal grant. The added cost of removing the maples will be about $75,000. Financing that is another problem, and replacement of trees in not in the current budget.

The 5 p.m. meeting at on the corner of Grant and Ferry, where the first problem root was discovered by the sidewalk contractor, drew about a dozen Ferry residents, a few other citizens, three city councilmen, the mayor, the city clerk, the police chief and an arborist the sidewalk construction company called in after realizing some roots were so big that cutting them would eventually kill the trees after first making them unstable and unsafe.

The city had notified residents along the street of Monday's meeting with doorhanger notices left at each residence on Friday, so city officials could explain and show on site what has happened to prompt what they said was the unexpected direction of the sidewalk replacement project.

The same arborist, whom Mayor Bob Poch introduced as Dan Nelson Monday, was also at last Wednesday night's city council meeting as council members were walked through the problem the city had barely learned about. It wasn't on the agenda.

The city had already signed the contract for the sidewalk repair company, J.M. Pacific Construction, Inc., which was on site with workers and equipment. When they started lifting old sidewalk sections, they came across a 12-inch-thick root under the sidewalk and growing into the adjacent yard.

Removing that large of a root, which Nelson termed a "structural" root, would kill the tree but render it possibly dangerous in the meantime; roots hold the tree up. The contractor was worried about future liability, and had not bid to do that extensive root cutting.

Nelson, a retired arborist who said he'd over a year ago sold Columbia Basin Tree Service, the company the city is wanting a contract with, estimated that about a third of the trees along the two-block street would be in that same shape, but the rest had also already reached their peak.

Monday night, he told residents that the trees have reached an exponential growth stage, which would get more intense as roots are cut, causing greater damage to replacement sidewalks and probably curbs.

The maples, which normally grow in an open forest, he said, had "just literally outgrown their place" in the city's 7-foot-wide planting strip.

Resident Klendon Duclos said when sidewalks were replaced along Columbia a decade ago, the same advice was given, yet not a tree came down. Same story on Douglas, another iconic boulevard leading to city hall, where old elms had to come out in the early 1990s, replaced with another species, but those sidewalks have also been replaced since then with none of those now-large trees being removed.

"Had we been given an option - would you rather have the sidewalk or the trees? - I'd have kept my crappy sidewalk," he said. "It's been crap for 22 years."

But Poch said the crappy sidewalks also represent a tripping hazard and a potential city liability, for which everyone in town would pay.

David Schmidt, a former town councilman, said repeatedly that alternatives to concrete sidewalks should be considered, such as cobblestone, popular at resorts with old trees and in places where tree roots can be a problem.

Nelson said an arborist should have been brought in on the project much earlier.

Some neighbors who have recently moved into houses on the street said later that the trees had been an important factor in their decisions to move there.

At the city council meeting last week, the council had decided to hold the Ferry meeting with street residents but to hold a larger meeting for the rest of the town later, since most streets are running into the same issues with trees, and decisions will have to be made.

Residents and city officials meet on Ferry Avenue next to a maple tree whose structural root had grown to a foot in diameter under the sidewalk.

"When I chose a place to live, I chose west Coulee Dam for the trees," said Sheri Edwards, the writer's wife, who lives on Stevens, a block down from the corner where Monday's meeting was held. "So, if you're ... now going forward, and you're thinking we don't want to deal with trees, so now it becomes not the kind of town I want to live in. I mean, it's sad. Trees add value to your home. They help with pollution; they give us shade. It just breaks my heart that we have to take them down."

"You know, as an arborist," Nelson said, "I agree with you so much. And that's the thing, you have to have planning going forward. You can have a town with a lot of beautiful trees. ... So, the city needs to up its game on trees, there's no question. There's a lot of room for it and this town can still have a lot of trees and it should have a lot of trees."