$200,000.00 for 60 trees. That works out to $3333.33 per tree including a watering system. This is a bit ridiculous in my opinion. It looks like Mr. Scott and Mr. Skakun are the only ones that think about the cost of things. Everyone else on council must be very well off to give the O.K. to something like this. Perhaps they should pay for it out of their own pockets. I'm not interested in wasting that amount of money on some trees. We should get the people that are doing community service for one thing or another to go out of town 5 or 10 miles and dig up some trees and bring them into town and plant them.

Way to go Duffer. Put those people to work who are responsible for mowing down & demolishing our trees through reckless tirades through our city.

Make them pay for them with their labour. Percy

A little hint here ... it is difficult to plant trees in concrete.

;-)

"George Paul says the benefiting property owners can either be taxed at the time, or at the conclusion of the project"

Now there is the rub, isn't it? Who is the benefitting property owner?

Is it the property owner who gets a tree planted in front of the store?

Is it the whole downtown area, on the assumption that trees bring customers to the downtown?

Is it the property owner in Foothills Subdivision who might enjoy a walk downtown better with trees there?

BTW, has anyone ever done a study of the correlation between number of shoppers and the number of trees?

I like trees. I like trees downtown. The question is, who should pay for them? Hopefully the downtown merchants who will pay for them initially will be able to stay around long enough and increase business enough so that they can pay for the addtional cost of doing business through increased gross sales to those Foothills subdivision strollers.

If not, we will have more trees and more boarded up businesses.