Southampton Village Replaces Unwell Trees, Maintains Tree City USA Status

​When Southampton Village started going through the designation process for Tree City USA recognition several years ago, it was a serious commitment.

The Tree City USA program is sponsored by the Arbor Day Foundation, in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service and the National Association of State Foresters, and recognizes municipalities that are dedicated to effective and sustainable urban forest management.

The village achieved the designation in 2023 by meeting the program’s four requirements: maintaining a tree board or department, having a tree care ordinance, dedicating an annual community forestry budget of at least $2 per capita, and hosting an Arbor Day observance and proclamation.

Since then, it’s been a point of pride for many village residents and business owners, who take careful note whenever any tree work is done in the village.

Planting trees is certainly a big part of maintaining the Tree City status, but there’s more to it than that.

In recent weeks, village employees from the Parks Department have been hard at work, in close collaboration with the village’s Tree Committee, addressing the issue of several dead and unwell trees throughout the central business district. Many of them had been permanently damaged by holiday lights that are wrapped tightly around the trunk and branches and traditionally have stayed on the trees all year.

Realizing that leaving the wires wrapped around the trees year round has been detrimental to some trees, the village is requiring that the lights are only wrapped around the trees from around Veterans Day until March.

The trees that cannot be saved, however, have been removed, and the Parks Department has been replacing those dead trees with new ones.

Residents and visitors to the village may have noticed activity on Main Street, Jobs Lane, North Main Street and Jagger Lane, where crews are taking down several of the trees, and replacing them with new ones.

“Some of them were in terrible condition,” Southampton Village Mayor Bill Manger said, adding that many of the trees marked for removal were completely hollowed out inside when they were taken down. “Obviously that’s not a good thing if you have a huge windstorm, which we’ve been getting recently,” he added. “We decided the best course of action was to remove those trees and replant new ones.”

The village even added a few additional trees in some of those areas, Manger said.

Thanks to the work of those crews, there are now new ginkgo and maple trees in several areas of the village.

“You do have to do tree maintenance,” he said.

Manger pointed out that he’s been a big proponent of adhering to the Tree City USA standards during his time as mayor. Since he took office in 2022, the village has planted approximately 600 trees, he said.

According to John Flick, the head of the Parks Department, the village has planted 208 trees in 2025.