The Manager of Parks and Civic Facilities for the city of Kamloops calls mutilating trees a disgusting act.

The message comes after 11 pine trees in the Sahali area were damaged and injected with poison in what’s believed to be an attempt to improve sight-lines. Jeff Putnam remains hopeful they can still be saved. “Lots of mechanisms that we’ve got in our tool kit to charge people for doing so. And there’s a whole tree protection by-law that our by-laws department manages. And I know that’s an active investigation and I don’t want to get into too much detail.”

He says it is very challenging to grow trees in Kamloops and there are only 16,000 of them in the city’s inventory. “The majority of them are in natural open space and they rely on mother nature to irrigate them. So when someone damages, in this case a stand of pine trees in a natural area, if those trees died it would take literally decades for them to grow back in that area.”

Putnam says we have a special climate here and provide a valuable service for the community. “Sequester carbon monoxide and ozone and nitrogen, they take that out of our environment. Produce oxygen of course and they also cool our environment. If you could imagine going down to Riverside Park if there weren’t any of those beautiful, mature trees out there it would not be as enjoyable an experience.”

Putnam says there is an urban forest management plan which helps guide the city to plant more trees in public spaces and there are a couple of different programs in place to do just that.