The bug that killed your ash tree showed up in Rochester in June 2011, at Upper Falls Park on St. Paul Street. Emerald ash borer. It had already turned up in Scottsville the year before, so nobody was shocked, but downtown made it official. Fifteen years later we're removing the last of the holdouts.
Monroe County has one of the densest ash populations in the state. That's not a fun fact — it's why the dead ones are stacked up in backyards all over the county.
How to tell if the ash in your yard is already gone
Ash is easy to spot once you know it: opposite branching, compound leaves, diamond-pattern bark on a mature trunk. Walk out and look up.
- Thinning from the top down. EAB kills the crown first. A canopy that's half bare while the lower limbs still leaf out is the classic look.
- Epicormic sprouts. Shoots erupting straight out of the trunk and root flare. That's the tree panicking.
- D-shaped exit holes, about an eighth of an inch, in the bark. Not round. The D shape is the tell.
- Bark blonding and woodpecker damage. Woodpeckers strip the outer bark chasing larvae and leave pale patches. From the street it looks like the tree has been sanded.
- S-shaped galleries under loose bark. Peel a flake off a dead limb and you'll see the serpentine tunnels that girdled it.
Why waiting costs you money
Here's the part people don't expect. A dying maple leans on you for years. A dead ash does not. Ash goes brittle fast — the wood loses its fiber strength and limbs snap off with no warning and no bend. Two or three years past death, a climber can't safely trust it, and the job turns into a crane or a bucket setup with rigging on every piece.
That's the difference between a routine medium removal and a hazardous one. In this market a 25-to-50-foot removal typically runs somewhere in the $600-$1,200 range; a big dead one over 80 feet, tight to a house or wires, can land north of $2,000-$3,500. Same tree. Different year. Add stump grinding — figure roughly $2-$4 per inch of diameter, with a minimum — and get it done on the same visit, because a separate trip back always costs more.
Access matters as much as size. A narrow gate on a Park Avenue lot, or an old-growth backyard in Corn Hill with three neighbors' rooflines in play — that's where the number climbs.
Treat or remove?
The City treats around 3,604 ash in rights-of-way and parks with TREE-age, an injected insecticide. Treatment works, but it's a subscription, not a cure — you're committing to reinjection for the life of the tree. It's a reasonable call for a healthy, structurally sound specimen ash you actually love, close to the house, with less than maybe 30% crown loss.
Once the canopy is more than about a third gone, you're paying to slow a funeral. Remove it and plant something that isn't on a hit list — and please, not another silver maple. In March 1991, seventeen hours of freezing rain took out over 10,000 trees inside the city and 51% of the green ash. Silver maple was the worst-hit species that week. Well-maintained, structurally sound trees came through it fine.
The firewood rule
Monroe County sits inside New York's EAB Restricted Zone. You cannot move untreated ash wood or firewood out of the zone. That means the pile from your removal doesn't go to the camp in the Adirondacks, doesn't go to your brother-in-law upstate, and doesn't ride in the back of a pickup across county lines. Burn it here or have it hauled. That's how the beetle got here in the first place — on a trailer.
Permits, which depend entirely on where you live
This is the part that confuses people, because we work across half a dozen sets of rules.
- City of Rochester: a permit is generally required for a private tree 6 inches or more in diameter (measured about 4.5 inches above grade), $90 to apply. But dead, diseased, damaged and hazard trees are exempt — and so are owner-occupants of a one-family parcel under an acre. Your dead ash almost certainly qualifies. The exemptions do not cover designated landmark trees or anything in the tree lawn or right-of-way. Street trees belong to the Forester Division (585-428-7581); you can't take one down yourself, and you shouldn't try.
- Brighton: permits kick in on parcels over an acre, and the Woodlot Protection District requires a development permit for anything over 5 inches. Dead and diseased removal is exempt. We deal with this constantly on Brighton jobs.
- Brockport and Canandaigua: the village and city regulate public, park and right-of-way trees. Private removal is largely unregulated out that way — though Canandaigua's Tree Advisory Board has floated a notification ordinance, so don't assume it stays that way. Same general story for our Avon and Livingston County work.
Call your own town before you assume. The answer genuinely changes street to street.
If your ash has been standing dead through the last two winters, it's on borrowed time and so is the price. Lake-effect snow around here is wet and heavy enough to drop limbs in a nothing storm. Send us an address and we'll tell you what it is, whether it's worth treating, and what it costs to take down — Rochester Tree Removal has been pulling dead ash out of this county since the beetle got here.