supplied specification extract · 3 sections indexed
WDC Programme Maintenance Specification — Street Tree Management (supplied extract)
Open the live sourceText capture of public Tree Truck material. The link opens the live original. Nothing here came from a Tree Truck system.
Section 1
The four clearances: 2.5m pedestrian, 4.5m local roads, 1m furniture, 1m buildings
The supplied extract of the specification records concrete clearances a job can be measured against: 2.5m over pedestrian areas, 4.5m over local roads, 1m clear of street furniture, lamp columns, signs and traffic signals, and 1m clear of buildings. Those four figures are the checkable standard, and they are quoted here exactly as the extract states them, not rounded and not restated. Two of the four can be confirmed against the council's own published Trees page, which gives 4.5 metres as the clearance height for minor roads within Whanganui and 2.5 metres as the clearance height for footpaths. The 1 metre clearances from street furniture and from buildings appear in the supplied extract only. A recorded clearance below any of these figures on a completed council job is a finding against the specification, which is the whole reason the numbers are worth holding as data rather than as a habit.
Section 2
Condition standards: deadwood, epiphytes, ivy, epicormic growth and debris
The extract records the condition the specification expects a maintained tree to be left in. Trees are to be kept free of major deadwood, dry or diseased wood, epiphytes, ivy and vines, epicormic growth, and rubbish or unwanted debris. It also records a continuity rule that matters on older streets: where a tree has previously been pruned or pollarded to a particular style, that style continues. That is a constraint on the crew rather than a preference, because changing the style of a pollarded tree is what the council's own strategy identifies as having caused structural weakness and repeat cost. The customer outcomes the same extract records are that mature trees are kept safe and healthy, and that young trees are pruned and maintained so they grow well-formed.
Section 3
Legislative compliance around power lines, written into the specification itself
The supplied extract records that the specification requires legislative compliance around power lines, naming the Electricity (Hazards from Trees) Regulations 2003 and the Telecommunications Act 2001, with pruning anticipating growth rates ahead of the next inspection cycle. That last clause is the operationally awkward one: the cut is not made to today's clearance but to the clearance that will still hold when the next cycle comes round, which on the council's published three year inspection cycle means pruning for three years of growth. It also means a job that satisfies the council's clearance figures can still leave a tree encroaching a growth limit zone under the electricity regulations, because those zones are measured at maximum design sag and are a different standard with a different owner.