Should 50-year-old elm trees die in Oak Park so that new sod can be watered in Naperville? The Du Page Water Commission, endowed with vast powers by the Illinois legislature, has embarked on a mammoth multimillion-dollar project to bring Lake Michigan water to the parched and thirsty instant communities springing up in the western suburbs. Their contractor, Kenny Construction of Wheeling, has burrowed through the west side of Chicago and fetched up in Oak Park. The tunnel, on its inexorable march to the hinterlands, has encountered the wrath of the village’s citizenry.
While Richard made more telephone calls, Lois Jean stood under a tree threatened by a man with a hard hat and chain saw. “The tree cutter told her he would call the police department, and she told him, ‘That’s the only way you’re going to cut down this tree–to put me in jail,’” says Richard, a retired nurseryman who calls the trimmers “tree butchers.” When his and other telephone calls brought assorted village officials to the scene, the work was stopped. But only temporarily, he claims. “They came back at 3, and so did my wife.” Zaun estimates the damage at an average $3,000 per tree.
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Bill Cokenower–the president of Cokenower Tree Experts, Inc., the subcontractor–denies that any of his vehicles were unlicensed. Moreover, he states, “They’re pruned the way they’re supposed to be pruned, the trees are. The contract calls for cutting them curb to curb. Sometimes that meant we cut ’em back so far there wasn’t much left.”
Stankovich was on vacation the week of the cutting and pruning; he returned on Monday to find the damage done. He hopes to save the severely pruned trees. “We’re going to keep an eye on the trees, do deep root fertilization, and see how they do. It’s going to be many, many years before they’re going to be like that again,” he says, and then adds, “I don’t think it serves any purpose to blame anybody.”
Nielsen is a polite, soft-spoken man with a temper that flares when he believes himself wrongly challenged. He says that he has met with the water commission twice, “looking for alternatives.” The primary difficulty, he says, is that the commission has access to any public right-of-way. He says that he asked the commission why the pipeline didn’t go through Berwyn and Cicero, whose city parents have never been conspicuously proforestry, and that they told him that Jackson Boulevard was a better route.
Sue Helfer promises something more than legal action. “My feeling is that they think they’re just going to come in here and mow our trees down. I think what they went for was the quickest, easiest way of doing it. They weren’t counting on our paying attention to our trees,” she says. “But they’ll have people lined up out there to stop them. They’ll have people camping out in sleeping bags. People in Oak Park just aren’t going to stand by and let them cut our trees down.”
