COMHAIRLE CONTAE ÁTHA CLIATH THEAS
SOUTH DUBLIN COUNTY COUNCIL

MEETING OF SOUTH DUBLIN COUNTY COUNCIL

Monday, December 12, 2022

QUESTION NO.21

QUESTION: Councillor Eoin Ó Broin

To ask the Chief Executive how many staff of SDCC are employed as ground workers pruning and maintaining the street tree stock of the county?

REPLY:

The requirements of the approved tree maintenance programme demand that the Public Realm Operations section can assign staff to tree maintenance work in a flexible manner as the large variety of tasks requires.  Some tasks require large numbers of staff to be assigned to a crew where the job at hand can involve multiple tasks such as traffic management and control, cleaning and removal of debris, pruning of branches from a Mobile Elevated Working Platform (MEWP), cutting of tree branches on the ground, shredding of small branches and foliage and disposal of cut timber and shredded material.  On the other hand the operation needs to be flexible in it's response to the need for other less complicated tasks to be carried out, such as the pruning of low hanging branches from the ground where such tasks can in general be carried out by a two person crew.  Where the need arises additional staff can be assigned to tree maintenance which means that the numbers of staff assigned to tree maintenance can vary from day to day and throughout the course of the year.  The key issue here is the need to be able to respond to the demands of the approved programme of tree maintenance work and the various tasks at hand on any given day in a flexible manner, assigning resources to these as required while at the same time releasing resources to other work programmes where necessary.