Rob Steinmetz, a longtime resident of the Moody Hills neighborhood in northern Overland Park, isn’t so sure why the “beautiful” and mature oak tree in front of his yard had to be ripped out.
Now, it’s just a stump sitting near Moody Park Drive.
Dozens of other mature trees have also recently met the same fate across the Moody Hills neighborhood. The street, once shaded with towering trees, is now lined with stump after stump.
It’s all part of a street reconstruction project that will also completely overhaul other infrastructure in the Moody Hills neighborhood.
The project is just one of several planned over the next decade or so that seek to rebuild aging neighborhood streets, which are often lined with mature trees. The need to renovate aging streets often comes into conflict with the city’s long-term commitment to promote a healthy tree canopy and can make for a tough balance to strike.
Each year, one of the first major steps that comes with the commencement of street reconstruction work is the removal of large, mature street trees that public works crews have identified as being in the way of a project.
When that happens, residents often have mixed feelings.
Steinmetz, in the Moody Hills subdivision, said he and his neighbors are sad to see some of their trees go.
He has has lived in the neighborhood for roughly 45 years and said he felt like the tree canopy has been a big selling point for homebuyers in the area. However, he’s not mourning the loss of every tree — for some of them, he said it was just their time to go.
But he still had hoped that the oak tree in front of his house could have stayed.
“It’s on the side of the street that is not going to have a sidewalk, it does not have the water main on it, does not have sewer on it,” Steinmetz said. “Why did that one go away?”
He’s 75 years old, so he doesn’t think he’ll get to see the trees the city plants when the street is rebuilt become mature and offer the same benefits as their predecessors.
On the other side of the street, Andy Doty was kind of relieved to see some of the trees go, worried for much of the past several years that some of the older trees were at risk of falling or losing large limbs every time a storm blew through.
“It is sad to see them go, but at the end of the day, I think it’ll be safer in the neighborhood without them around,” he said.
Plus, he’s happy to see the infrastructure investments getting started on his street.
“I’m all for improving the infrastructure of the area,” Doty said. “I’m tired of the chip seal that’s always on the street, so we’re gonna get rid of that. Get new concrete streets, get new lighting, new signs, new underground utilities. So I think it’s a win-win all the way around.”
Trees as “essential infrastructure”
Overland Park has for decades put an emphasis on planting, protecting and preserving street trees and other trees to help create a healthy and diverse tree canopy.
A street tree, according to the city, is any tree in the public space between the curb and a front yard. For at least 20 years, Overland Park has kept an inventory of its street trees, including their estimated size and species.
Additionally, the city’s Legacy of Greenery Committee, an advisory group made up of residents, focuses on Overland Park’s tree canopy and helps the city maintain its Tree City USA status, a designation from the Arbor Day Foundation, that it’s had for well over 40 years.
“When you have the term park in your name, obviously your mind’s eye creates some kind of vision, and I think the vision it creates for most people is something that includes trees,” said Jim Dunn, a member of the Legacy of Greenery Committee.
Trees offer an aesthetic value, but for Dunn, it’s more than that.
“It’s not just beautification, but it’s also the health of our air,” he said, noting the environmental value. “There’s so much that you get from a healthy tree canopy.”
The Environmental Protection Agency says street trees are considered “a key part of public green infrastructure” and provide several benefits, including reducing the urban heat island effect, offering shade, encouraging wildlife and helping deal with stormwater runoff.
Councilmember Logan Heley also pointed out that street trees have been shown to slow down traffic on neighborhood streets and can have positive effects on property values.
He said he sees them as “essential infrastructure” in Overland Park, and unique because they tend to appreciate in value as they age, when other infrastructure elements — including roads and streetlights — depreciate over time.
“We really need to be valuing those mature trees for what they’re worth,” he said. “I’d really like to see us do everything possible to preserve the mature street trees that we have.”
Still, it can be hard to balance all of the factors at play, particularly when it comes to reconstructing old streets to meet modern engineering standards.
“We have to be realists because we all have to live in these neighborhoods,” Dunn said. “We need to save trees where we can, but at the same time, we have to still provide the basic services that citizens want, right? It begins to be, ‘What’s the trade-off here?’”
Why does the city have to remove so many trees?
Across the city, more than 130 lane miles of neighborhood streets are at the end of their useful life and in need of rebuilding in the next decade. Those are all aging asphalt streets that will be redone in concrete, and those older trees can get in the way of that.
Overland Park usually identifies which streets need reconstruction a few years ahead of time.
For instance, next year and in the following year, the city plans to focus its neighborhood street reconstruction efforts on the Wycliff subdivision near 103rd Street and U.S. Highway 69. Also in 2026, the city has identified some streets for reconstruction in the Westbrooke neighborhood around Switzer Road.
And while those streets are considered high priorities for reconstruction, those projects can be complex, said Public Works Director Lorraine Basalo.
“We’re working in neighborhoods that were built, you know, well over 60 years ago, and we are doing our best to bring them to our best practices today,” she said.
Additionally, because every neighborhood is different and the other infrastructure in it can be in varying conditions, these projects often bring with them other significant investments that can also be disruptive and affect trees, Basalo said.
On top of that, some streets are not 26 feet wide, the current minimum street width allowed in reconstruction projects, so they have to be widened. In other cases, neighborhoods might completely lack sidewalks or have limited sidewalk networks.
Below ground, the city completely redoes all the subbase parts of the road to make way for new concrete. Plus, sometimes stormwater improvements and other utility work are also needed.
All of that work — removing old asphalt, widening roads, expanding stormwater infrastructure, improving other utilities — can be a threat to existing mature trees along the street, particularly those that are within the public right of way.
“We look at what trees are in the vicinity of the type of work we’re doing, and what is their ability to survive that work,” Basalo said.
The city also has to consider if existing trees will damage new infrastructure if they continue to grow as they have (which is sometimes a factor in their removal).
Before actual reconstruction work begins, all of that is factored in during the planning and design process. Eventually, city foresters and public works staff go to the neighborhood and mull the future of the trees, going tree by tree.
“We do our best to try to protect every tree that we can protect, but they’re also going to be trees that may be in conflict,” Basalo said. “The amount of trees really is going to depend on that neighborhood. It’s going to depend on the way it’s laid out.”
Can more trees be saved in Overland Park?
For a few years now, the Overland Park City Council has listed reviewing the street reconstruction resolution as a strategic goal, though councilmembers admit there hasn’t been a lot of formal discussion or actual action so far.
“We have not updated the overall policy, and I think there’s still a lot of work to do there,” Heley said. “I think we need to change our thinking about the [tree] assets that we have in our city.”
Heley and other councilmembers see room for flexibility.
“The existing policy probably doesn’t give our staff and our consultants good creativity on how to preserve those street trees,” said Councilmember Drew Mitrisin, who represents Moody Hills in Ward 2. “We have pretty rigid standards on how to do these projects, and when those come into conflict with existing street trees, the road ends up winning out.”
Councilmember Melissa Cheatham, the other Ward 2 representative, offered similar sentiments.
“I think there are some real challenges to preserving trees if we are going to continue to do things the way we’ve done them in the past,” she said.
Cheatham also said she’d love to see more options considered for the equipment crews to use, or other alternatives that could be less harmful to street trees when it comes to reconstructing neighborhood roads. She thinks the city could potentially learn from best practices in other cities.
“[I want] to see if there are changes we can make to make sure — we probably can’t save every tree — but that we save more,” Cheatham said.
Looking ahead, local leaders told the Post that the city’s pending Urban Forest Plan could help the city move forward on the issue.
That plan, still in the planning phase, is expected to come to the Overland Park City Council for adoption some time later this year alongside a new parks and recreation master plan called Playbook OP.
Kay Brown, the chair of the Legacy of Greenery Committee, is a member of the group helping to steer the Urban Forest Plan and Playbook OP. She said a lot of her work with the city has been focused on preserving mature trees in infrastructure projects.
“It’s very difficult, because sometimes even if you’re trying to preserve the tree, you may hurt its roots, and that tree may still go ahead and die,” she said. “I’m hoping to influence some of that to help improve the preservation.”
Meg Ralph, strategic communications manager for Overland Park, said the city expects to see recommendations for new policies or policy amendments related to trees come out of that plan. Specifics about what those might entail and how the city might incorporate them into its practices are unclear.
Overland Park is working to enhance the tree canopy
At the same time, Dunn and others said they felt like Overland Park has been improving on the way it factors trees into its big public works projects, including street trees.
“I don’t think they always do it the way that I’d want them to do it, but I do think that at least there’s a consciousness to it now that didn’t always exist before,” he said.
For one thing, Overland Park plants new trees in neighborhoods after reconstruction projects with a diverse canopy in mind. Additionally, the city has been looking at ways to expand its tree canopy.
In 2023, the city started a pilot initiative focused on an enhanced tree canopy. Under that pilot — which Basalo said public works staff is still operating — extra funds were set aside to offer more tree plantings in these neighborhoods in case there were gaps or missing trees before. So, instead of just planting one tree for each removed tree, the city is planting additional trees.
“We felt that it was an opportunity to be able to kind of start to enhance the canopy in that neighborhood,” Basalo said.
Cheatham said she sees that as a success but also as a starting point.
“I think my ideal would be to have street trees along every street in Overland Park,” she said.
