The City of Council Bluffs was recently awarded a $20,000 Trees Please! Grant from MidAmerican Energy.
Terry Hoffman is the Resource and Project Development Coordinator for the Council Bluffs Park and Recreation Department. Hoffman explains Trees Please is an energy efficiency program that provides funds to help the city plant more trees.
He says it’s a great way to green up the community and helps reduce energy consumption. And with the emerald ash borer afflicting many trees in the area, this grant gives the city the opportunity to replace those trees with healthy ones.
Hoffman says the Park and Recreation Department watches trees for disease and potential safety issues.
"So when we have weather events, we always get a lot of phone calls that follow that. So we do a lot of customer service calls where people call in and say that a limb has come down or a tree is starting to lean or if it’s been hit by lightning. We manage all kinds of different issues. We manage the cleanup of all of that as well as the long term maintenance of it."
Hoffman says his department will do about $10,000 worth of the tree work this spring. He says replacements are needed at River’s Edge Park.