Tree Removal and Trimming in Olympia Fields, IL

Ten inches is not a big tree. It is the maple you planted when the children were small. In Olympia Fields that is the line: §6-102 defines a protected tree as “any live tree which has a diameter at breast height (DBH) of more than ten inches (10") and which is not otherwise exempted.” Cross it and the tree removal Olympia Fields owners treat as their own business becomes a permitted activity rather than a private decision. Get it wrong and §6-118 sets the fine at “not less than five hundred dollars ($500.00) nor more than one thousand dollars ($1,000.00).”

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Ten Inches, And What It Costs To Get It Wrong

Article IV of Chapter 6, §§6-101 to 6-118, is a genuine private-property preservation regime, unusual this far south. Section 6-105 reaches any activity that “anticipates or involves the actual or reasonably likely damage or removal of any protected tree or public tree” — damage counts, not only felling. Section 6-111 governs the removal permit and lets the village take “a fee in lieu of making such replacement,” which “shall equal the tree replacement value based on the average cost per tree inch.” The per-inch rate is not published, so ask the village for it. Behind all of it is the village arborist, established by §6-103 “within the department of public works.”

Two provisions are worth knowing before you need them. In a genuine emergency, §6-115 provides that “a tree removal permit will be issued by the village without formal application,” so nobody has to choose between a dangerous tree and a permit backlog. And the plan-review fee schedules at §§9-30 and 9-31 both carry the line “Village arborist: Four hundred dollars ($400.00)” — on single-family permits and on multifamily and commercial alike. Budget for it before you draw a patio near a mature tree.

Sixteen Subdivisions Built Around A 1915 Golf Course

Small and deliberate: 2.94 square miles, 4,718 people, incorporated in August 1927 with Charles Beach as first president. Beach and James Gardner had already laid out a 72-hole course, the club dating to 1915, and the village grew outward from it — farmland and wealthy Chicagoans’ summer retreats becoming what the county annex counts as 16 subdivisions or homeowners associations.

Water is the constraint. The Little Calumet River and Butterfield Creek both run through, and the annex names Governors Highway, Vollmer Road, Crawford Avenue and 83rd Street at the Tri-State Tollway as places that go under, along with the Graymoor, Hawthorne Hills and Vienna Woods subdivisions. Against that the village holds no FEMA repetitive-loss properties at all — nuisance flooding on the road network, not water in living rooms. For trees the effect is the same either way: saturated root zones and poor anchorage. A Tree City USA since 2007, the village nonetheless proposes in its own annex a study to inventory trees and develop a “forestry program of tree trimming and maintenance,” which says plainly that there is no village-wide trim cycle yet. Most of this canopy is in whatever condition its owners have paid for, which is why the tree removal Olympia Fields sees is nearly all reactive, arriving after a failure instead of ahead of one.

Our Work In Olympia Fields

• Removals of protected trees, quoted with the §6-111 permit and any replacement costed in
• Pruning on large private stock that no village trim cycle reaches
• Stump grinding, with debris cleared to the §6-114 standard
• Emergency and storm work under the §6-115 exception

Book A Tree Removal Olympia Fields Estimate

Give us the address and, if you can get a tape round the trunk at chest height, the diameter. That one measurement tells us immediately whether this is a protected tree and a permit or a straightforward job. If you would rather read up first, the ISA’s homeowner guidance explains how DBH is taken and why the number carries so much weight.

Call 708-424-5885. More on where we work in Cook County, and nearby: Matteson, Flossmoor.