Where have all the trees gone? Broadway Street beautification project underway

IDAHO FALLS — A beautification project for the downtown area in Idaho Falls is slated to get underway next week.

The West Broadway Street Sidewalk Improvement Project will begin Monday. The planned areas for improvement will be between Memorial Drive and North Yellowstone Avenue. The project will last about 45 days. The improvements include the replacement of curb, gutter, and sidewalks so that they’re ADA compliant.

You may have noticed some activity on the project already. The city Parks and Rec. department began replacing trees in the area on Tuesday.

“We’ve run into a couple of instances where (trees are) root bound or they’re not healthy or they’re older,” Public works spokesperson Kerry Hammon tells EastIdahoNews.com.

Catherine Smith, executive director of Idaho Falls Downtown Development Corporation, says the trees have been there for about three decades. Parks and Rec have ordered at least 19 new replacement trees. The new trees will be “healthier trees specific to the difficult environment found along a highly used traffic corridor,” Smith says.

Existing planter boxes will continue to be replaced downtown as well. Some planters have already been replaced with pots.

“We’ve also torn out some of those older planters downtown that were falling apart,” Hammon says. “They were just old and they needed to be replaced so we’ve taken out some of those planters on those corners and replaced them with pots.”