THE city of Ballarat has been attacked on social media after officers nailed a sign to an already damaged tree in a bid to seek information from the public on how it had been vandalised.
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Ballarat’s Thumbs up, Thumbs down Facebook page was flooded with comments over the weekend from irate residents, after a photo of a tree with council sign nailed to the trunk, was posted on the site on Saturday afternoon.
The tree, which had its branches sawed off on Learmonth Road in Mitchell Park has been so severely vandalised it is not expected to survive.
But residents dubbed the move by council officers to nail the sign to the tree as only adding to the damage already done.
One resident, posted that nailing a sign to a tree was more like vandalism than “lopping off a couple of branches.”
“I wonder if they count themselves as causing willful damage to the council tree by hammering nails into it,” the post read.
Others accused the council of wasting ratepayers’ money on installing the signage.
However, Ballarat's acting city infrastructure general manager Terry Demeo said the sign was installed to alert the community to the issue of tree vandalism and to find out information on who carried out the attack.
Mr Demeo said the purpose of the sign was also to deter other residents from vandalising trees in the future.
"In this instance, a professional arborist has determined the trees have been lopped to the point that they will not recover, and must be removed," Mr Demeo said.
He said it was not the council's customary practice to nail signs to trees and the same process would not have been done to a healthy or recoverable tree.
"In this instance, the trees have been damaged beyond repair and will be removed in the coming months," Mr Demeo said. "Alerting the public to tree vandalism where it occurs is a new practice the city is trialling, in line with other proactive tree protection activities.”
Mr Demeo added the practice was already in place in several other municipalities and was a direct response to feedback from residents who placed a high value on Ballarat’s trees.
The tree vandalism mirrors a similar incident earlier this year where vandals poisoned a fully grown elm tree on Ascot Street. The attack prompted the council to intensify its tree protection strategy.
