Federally-funded debris removal in the town of Monticello wascompleted Friday, officials said.

Any removal done now will have to be done by town work crews,Mayor David Nichols told aldermen during Tuesday’s meeting.

Under the policy outlined Tuesday, town work crews will continueto remove vegetative debris, including large trees, that residentsmove onto the public right-of-way on roads, but will not removestumps.

The policy discussion was opened by Ward Two Alderman SteveMoreman, who expressed some concern about the amount of debris thatcould still be found in residents’ yards. He said the town shouldnot have pay for removal of large trees that homeowners were toolazy to move to the side of the road in the past eight weeks.

“There are still a lot of large trees in yards,” he said. “Ithink anything larger than something we would normally pick upshould be the homeowner’s responsibility.”

Ward One Alderman Jerry Goode pointed out that in some casesthere were special circumstances, such as disagreements withinsurance companies over who would remove the tree. Also, he said,”we never specified a maximum circumference that we would pick upso I think if they can get it to the side of the road we should getit as we can.”

Nichols said citizens will need to understand that byauthorizing town crews to remove large trees it will slow the crewsdown considerably because they lack the right equipment for thejob. For example, some days crews may only get to remove largedebris from two locations instead of being able to clear a muchlarger area of nothing but limbs.

Although aldermen will allow work crews to remove trees, theywere not authorized to remove stumps.

“We’re done with stumps,” Nichols said. “We don’t have theequipment to remove stumps.”

Although Moreman originally opened the discussion saying itshould now be a homeowner’s responsibility to remove large trees,the motion to continue to remove all vegetative debris, exceptstumps, passed unanimously.