Tree Care in McCook, Illinois

McCook has the thinnest tree regime we have found in any municipality we cover. Chapter 90, “Vegetation,” is a single section. Section 90-1 requires that all trees be kept, maintained or cultivated so that any branch extending over a public way is trimmed at least eight feet above the ground for a sidewalk and ten feet above the ground for a street, and bars attaching signs, wires or ropes to public trees without written board permission. That is the whole chapter. No removal permit, no parkway ownership rule, no DBH threshold, no arborist license class. Nobody is going to stop you, so the tree removal McCook property owners decide on rests entirely on their own judgment and on whoever they hire.

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Where McCook’s Tree Rules Actually Live

The one place the village does protect trees is in the building code, and it is easy to miss. Section 18-42, “Protection and replacement of trees,” requires that “measures shall be taken to insure that trees are not harmed and to insure that property is not stripped of all trees.” Trees may be tagged at the building commissioner’s request. Destroyed trees must be replaced unless the lot retains at least one tree per 1,000 square feet of gross lot area, and replacement trees “shall be hardwood with a diameter of at least three inches.” Which hardwood is left to you, and the Morton Arboretum in Lisle keeps recommendation lists for this soil and climate. There are no permit or fee provisions attached, which makes it a construction-time standard rather than a day-to-day one.

The general penalty at 1-10 makes a code violation a misdemeanor punished by a fine not exceeding $750.00, each day separate. Contractor classes at 22-46 are similarly plain: Class A Carpenter $100.00, Class B Concrete $100.00, Class C General Construction $100.00, Class D Snow Removal $100.00 and Class E All others not classified $100.00, with insurance and license bonds required though the amounts are not published anywhere we can cite. There is no tree, arborist or landscaper class, so tree work registers under Class E.

We state all of that plainly rather than dress it up, because the honest version is more useful. In McCook the ordinance will not tell you whether a tree should come down; only an inspection will, which is why every tree removal McCook quote we write starts with someone standing under the tree.

Two Hundred And Forty-Nine Residents Beside A Working Quarry

McCook has 249 residents — the lowest population of any municipality in Cook County — spread across 2.6 square miles fourteen miles south-west of the Loop, where mobile homes account for 526 units, 39.8 percent of the housing stock. Almost everything else here is industry.

The dominant feature is the Vulcan Materials Company McCook Quarry. Kimball and Cobb Stone Company was sold to Vulcan in 1897, and in 2003 the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District contracted with Vulcan to extract limestone, moving rock by conveyor belt beneath I-55 and the Des Plaines River to the quarry for processing, for the ten-billion-gallon McCook Reservoir; Stage 1 was completed in late 2017 and Stage 2 is currently being excavated. The village’s own hazard note is short and telling: there is a quarry that has weakened roads around buildings. Ground that will not hold a road reliably is not holding root plates reliably either, and that is the practical reason McCook trees lean before they look sick. Much of the tree removal McCook work we quote begins with a trunk out of plumb rather than a crown in decline.

The Des Plaines River runs through the south-east and north-east corners of the village, though FEMA records zero repetitive-loss properties. Other employers include UOP and the Progress Rail locomotive plant, with one facility storing 100,000 pounds of ammonia. A 1958 Reynolds Metals explosion killed six, and an EF-1 tornado struck in July 2023. The village has held StormReady Gold status since 2014, which is a fair signal of how seriously a place of 249 people takes weather.

Tree Removal McCook: What We Do

• Removals on ground affected by quarry settlement, where a lean is the first symptom
• Trimming to the eight-foot sidewalk and ten-foot street clearances section 90-1 sets
• Stump grinding on industrial frontages and residential lots alike
• Emergency and storm response, including after tornado-force wind

Tree Removal McCook Estimates

With no permit process to wait on, the only thing between a decision and the work is an inspection. Tell us the address and we will come and look. Free, and we will say if the tree can stay.

Call 708-424-5885. See our Cook County coverage, plus neighboring Hodgkins and Summit.