City putting roots down on tree replacement
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FAIRMONT - Before the ground freezes this year, the city of Fairmont plans to plant around 100 trees throughout the city to replace the ash trees removed over the past few years.
The process started in June of 2022, when Emerald Ash Borer was first detected. This necessitated removal, which went into full gear in 2024 and 2025, when 971 and 1,000 trees respectively were removed. Ever since they started, Fairmont Forester Cody Benschoter said they have been planning on tree replacement.
"I don’t know if there’s a plan to do one for one," he said. "That’s what we’re doing here, one for one. I took, I believe, six ash trees out of this boulevard. I’m going to put five back. It really depends on the area. Like Cedar Creek Park, there’s no way we’re going to do one for one. There’s just too many."
The area Benschoter refers to is along North Main Street, near where Lincoln Park is, where he worked to plant trees on Thursday. Regarding removal, he said they're very confident they have pretty much all the street trees and alleys done.
"We’ll have to go through and look at the maps and verify that everything’s accurate," Benschoter said. "I know we have a handful of them on right-of-ways and areas that people aren’t thinking about. I know I have 30 ash trees at the soccer field. There’s just a couple that don’t look too bad, so we’ve been leaving them. Probably another 50 in the parks beside Cedar Creek. Cedar Creek is a whole different ball game."
Right now, Benschoter said the city has a relief grant they have been able to use to pay for planting trees. The grant started in 2023.
"We did 92 the first year, 117 last year and 106 new plants this year," he said. "We’ve been focusing on spots where we’ve been heavily hit. We haven’t really worried about boulevard trees, though. That’s the goal for the coming years. We did apply for another community resilience grant through the Minnesota DNR. Hopefully we get that and we can get another 115 trees for the next year."
When it comes to where and when they replace trees, Benschoter said they are prioritizing spots people use more.
"We did a ton the first year around the mini golf park; that was all new," he said. "I don’t know if it’ll be next year or the year after, but when we do the soccer field, we’ll replant all of them because that’s a very used area. We’re just trying to get the most bang for our buck, give the community the most benefit. I’ve been trying to split up these new trees by the wards. I don’t want to plant every single tree in the south end of town."
As for what kind of trees they're planting, Benschoter said they are doing a large variety including frontier elm, hornbeam, zelkova and ginkgo trees.
"They have a survey out, the 2020 community tree report for the city of Fairmont," he said. "It lists out acers, so all the maples. They estimate 33% of our urban canopy is acer, so we don’t want to plant that. We want more diversity, so if there’s ever something that’s going to get the maples, we don’t want to have the same issue."
As they have had issues in the past with planting large amounts of one type of tree and an issue wiping them all out with Dutch elm and ash trees, this time they want to have many types of trees, so a singular issue cannot take them all out.
"I try to get a few experimental ones every year and just see how they handle it," Benschoter said.
So far, five of the 106 trees have been planted. Planned locations for the rest include on Cedar Creek Road and in Cedar Creek Park, Veterans Park, Amber Park and the Winnebago Diamonds. While they have 101 trees left to go, Benschoter has no doubt they'll get them done.
"I got them all marked," he said. "If you go down Cedar Creek Road, there used to be a row of ash trees down the road going into the park, and I just marked all of them. That’s 33, and we’ll knock that out. Once we start getting caught up on some other stuff, we’ll start planting, and then I water and make sure they got enough water to go through the winter."
With or without grant funding, Benschoter said they will look at the budget and make plans for 2027. Regardless, like with removing the trees, this will be a multi-year process planned out to replace as many removed trees as possible.
"I don’t want to take out 60 trees and only plant 20," he said. "The ideal goal is you take a tree down, you plant a new one."
If individuals look to plant trees themselves on their boulevard, Benschoter asked that they let the city know, as they would like a chance to GPS-mark and tag it for their records.
For more information, call Cody Benschoter at 507-238-3914