City urged to be prepared for inevitable beetle invasion

FUNDING SOUGHT FOR EMERALD ASH BORER

Emerald ash borer beetles are coming to Lethbridge, says City parks manager David Ellis, and he is hoping council will heed his warning and begin to prepare today.

Ellis is asking council to consider putting aside a contingency fund of $750,000 a year over the next four years to help Lethbridge prepare for the coming invasion.

“I am of the opinion it is not if it comes here, it’s when,” states Ellis. “That’s why the budget ask is the way it is ... Similar for what we do for the snow reserve, if we can just set some money aside every year, it will lessen the blow. And when ash borer is here we are ready, we have some education materials out there, we’ve been monitoring, we catch it early, and then we can deal with it as a small problem instead of as something which is overwhelming.”

Ellis says there are about 10,000 ash trees in Lethbridge’s publicly managed urban forest, and about the same number on private lands. That 10,000 is about onequarter of the entire public tree coverage area for the city.

“My greatest fear is we will lose a quarter of our public trees,” states Ellis. “We’ve got like 40,000 public trees between street and park, and if we lose 10,000 of them it is going to change the landscape of the city significantly. We could plant other trees, but the cost to cut down a mature tree, stump it and replant it is about $600 a piece. For 10,000 trees, that’s six million bucks.”

Emerald ash borer beetles are an invasive species brought into North America on imported lumber pallets from northeastern Asia about 20 years ago. They have killed tens of millions of ash trees to date. It is feared by some experts Emerald ash borer could lead to the extinction of most of the approximately 8.7 billion native species of ash in North America over the coming decades. Spreading ever westward, the infestation reached Winnipeg just last year.

“We are looking at experiences of municipalities of other provinces and states from the east,” Ellis explains. “Where it has showed up it has totally devastated their ash population. If the ash borer gets here it will kill a tree within six years. It kind of scares us ... The best way to deal with it is early detection and education. So rather than get caught kind of by surprise, like we did with elm scale, and have to go get emergency funding, we’re thinking why don’t we build up a fund to deal with these kinds of things?”

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