2015 CITY BUDGET City pegs $443,000 to fight ash borer

Brantfordexpositor.ca
Jan. 23, 2015

The city is using money from OLG Casino Brantford to escalate its war on the emerald ash borer and reduce its 2015 operating budget.

Councillors voted at Thursday's estimates committee meeting to take $443,000 out of the city's casino revenue account to cut down ash trees on city-owned property.

The $443,000 had originally been included in the city's operating budget as an unmet need.

Councillors were told that it takes anywhere from $250 to $500 to cut down an ash tree and there are about 2,500 ash trees left on city-owned property.

They were also told the casino revenue accounts holds about $5 million, of which about $3 million has been committed for 2015.

Last year's budget included about $290,000 to deal with the invasive pest, which was discovered in North American in 2002 after it was accidentally imported from Asia. It has caused billons of dollars in damage.

Scientists originally believed the invasive would only harm ash trees.

But in a paper published this month in the Journal of Economic Entomology, researchers at Wright State University in Ohio reported the bad news that the emerald ash borer had attacked whitefringe trees, the closest relative of the ash tree and an increasingly popular ornamental tree in the U.S. and Canada.

"Things aren't looking good for ashes in North America and now other species," said Don Cipollini, a plant physiology professor at Wright State University, who detected the spread.

Cipollini said other trees and shrubs closely related to the whitefringe now need to be watched for ash borer infestations, including lilacs, forsythia, and privet. Cultivated olives, grown in the U.S. southeast, are also a close relative of the whitefringe and could be threatened.

"That is obviously hugely important," he said.

There's no risk for trees not related to the ash, such as maples, he said.

Earlier tests on walnut and hickory trees, which are more closely related, also indicate they don't support the ash borer.

Cipollini discovered the infested whitefringe trees in August along a bike path in Yellow Springs, Ohio, with five out of 20 trees damaged. Other infestations of whitefringe trees were later found elsewhere in the state.

A question raised by the discovery that emerald ash borers can attack more than ash trees is whether the pest is adapting to feed on new hosts or if it always had a wider range than first believed.

Cipollini's hunch is the ash borer probably had a wider range to begin with.

The borer was first detected in Canada in the Windsor, Ont., area in 2002.

The Canadian Forest Service has pegged the costs for Canadian municipalities of replacing the trees affected by the borer at $2 billion.