Trees on Holton's Square are building owners' responsibility

Business owners on Holton’s Town Square and their patrons either love them or hate them. Some want them to stay around as long as possible, while others just want them gone — and in some cases, they have been removed.
They are the Bradford pear trees that have been a part of the Square’s landscape since the early 1990s, and while the coming spring will show them at their most beautiful, blooming state, it’s the “berries” that form on the trees in the fall and then drop onto the sidewalks of the Square, creating a mess for business owners and patrons and staining the paint on vehicles parked on the Square, that are a source of aggravation.
But whether the trees stay or go from where they’re planted on the Square, as Holton City Manager Teresa Riley noted, is up to the owners of the businesses where the trees were planted as part of the Heritage Walk downtown beautification of the early 1990s — not the city — and so is any issue that might arise in the sidewalk in front of their business if the owners choose to remove them.
“If uprooting the trees would create an issue with the sidewalk, that issue would be theirs to fix,” Riley said. “A lot of the trees are starting to have issues, and we’re hoping that we don’t see any damages from them, because that would fall back on the business owner.”
At the present time, nine of those trees planted as part of the Heritage Walk have been removed, leaving 19 trees standing.
Those who want the Bradford pear trees gone, or are happy to see them removed, may take heart at recent action by Michael Beam, secretary of the Kansas Department of Agriculture, to place a “quarantine” on Bradfords or any other subspecies of Callery pear tree in Kansas, although that “quarantine” doesn’t take effect until Jan. 1, 2027.
“It will prohibit any movement of the tree into the state or within the state after that date,” said Heather Lansdowne, Kansas Department of Agriculture director of communications, on Beam’s order quarantining movement of Callery pear trees in the state. “It will not require the trees to be cut down — it just will not allow new movement, thus new planting, of the trees.”
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