Though the Washington Tree Committee faced challenges brought on by the pandemic, they still had several successes in their 30th year designated by Tree City USA.

Committee Chair Marde McConnell gave an annual report at the recent Washington City Council meeting, mentioning that in the committee’s three decades of work they’ve either planted or given away around 12,750 trees, they’ve received $130-140,000 in grants and around $110,000 in donations from their annual letter, and they’ve notched around a million volunteer hours. McConnell mentioned that they weren’t able to hold the annual sapling giveaway at the downtown farmers market, but they did hold the spring tree giveaway at the county fairgrounds instead of downtown in order to social distance, “It was a great experience to get to do it a different way. We’ll be happy when we can go back to doing it downtown because it gives us an opportunity for Andy (Dahl) to demonstrate some things and we get to support the downtown, but we’re anticipating since it’ll probably be first part of March that we’ll be out at the fairgrounds this year, but we’ll see.”

McConnell says they received a Trees Forever grant last year to plant at the new city water treatment plant but that has been extended to complete the project this spring, and they’ve applied for $4,300 in additional grant funds to do some planting at school buildings, the city municipal building, and downtown. Committee member Andy Dahl then presented the volunteer of the year award to Marde’s husband, Joe McConnell.