Just over 300 trees in the Queenstown Lakes district need to be felled or trimmed because experts say they are dangerous, but the Queenstown Lakes District Council does not have enough money set aside to deal with them all immediately.
The danger posed by unsafe trees was sheeted home during high winds in 2009 when Russell Albert Liggett (57) died when a 20m poplar tree fell on his Toyota Hilux cab as he was driving near his home on Lower Shotover Rd.
A report prepared by QLDC network operations engineer Michael Wardill, for a council infrastructure services committee meeting next week, says a 2010 survey by Asplundh examined 571 individual and groups of trees and classified 76 as needing "urgent" action.
Dealing with the dangerous trees would cost an estimated $104,000.
Five of the trees were in Wanaka, with the remainder in the Wakatipu.
Another 74 trees needed to be dealt with within 6 to 12 months, and another 155 trees within the next two years.
Mr Wardill said Treecare Southern Lakes was engaged to action the work, but it had become increasingly clear there was not enough money in the coffers to carry out the recommendations in the Asplundh report.
Mr Wardill said legal advice on the council's responsibility for trees on QLDC-owned road reserve, trees that straddled boundaries and those entirely on private land found that even if the QLDC did not own the tree, it could be seen as liable "in the event of inaction of held information".
In instances where there was "doubt of council ownership", some adjoining landowners had been approached to discuss the removal of trees.
"In most cases the landowners have accepted that the trees have largely benefited their property and agreed to remove/treat the trees at their own cost ... this is an ongoing process and is expected to reduce the numbers of trees that council has to remove by an estimated 20%."
However, the Department of Conservation, a "major owner of land affected by the dangerous tree issue" was reluctant to commit itself.
Mr Wardill said the average cost of felling and removing a tree was $1380 and there was about $30,000 remaining in the budget for this financial year.
The New Zealand Transport Agency had agreed to provide some funding, bringing the net budget up to $52,600 for this year.
Mr Wardill said the committee had four options: To target only urgent trees, which would satisfy the immediate need but would require revisiting most sites to reassess other trees in the future; target priority 1 to 3 trees in a given area; target only priority 1 and 2 trees, which would mean the higher priority trees would be dealt with faster; do nothing.
The committee will discuss the report at its meeting in Queenstown on Tuesday.
