District 158 talks down to the wire

It's been a quieter week for Huntley Unit District 158.

During the previous week, the district and the teachers union engaged in a public back-and-forth over the cost of the union's latest contract proposal.

Maybe the sides are tired from a week of bargaining in public. Or maybe they're just replenishing their strength for the next public battle.

Hopefully we haven't heard much from them because they've realized they have about two weeks of bargaining left if they want a contract in place by the time school starts Aug. 25.

The next bargaining meeting, according to the district, is on Monday. Even with three weeks left until school starts, the sides will need a few days to ratify a deal - leaving them even less time to bargain.

Can the union and the district do in two weeks what they have been unable to do during four months of bargaining, or will negotiations drag on into the school year?

Unless there's a breakthrough soon, it seems more and more likely the latter will come to pass.

A plague upon your households: I call it the Asian Invasion.

Beetles of Asian origin are running amok throughout the Chicago suburbs, and two pesky species were recently spotted in Huntley: the emerald ash borer and the Japanese beetle.

The discovery of the insects in Huntley shouldn't come as a surprise. Both have rapidly made their way across the eastern United States, with a new town reporting an infestation every week or two.

Pretty soon, it will be easier to make a list of suburban towns that the ash borer hasn't infested.

Huntley's Public Works Department has already started removing trees infested with the ash borer.

But the village is just beginning to get a handle on the problem. Public works is developing a plan to replace sick ash trees that it will present to the village board for approval.

I'll let you know what the village decides and how much it could cost. Other villages have estimated that fighting the ash borer, or cleaning up its mess, could cost millions.

But Huntley's Public Works Director Jim Schwartz tells me Huntley has one thing working in its favor: many of the village's trees are new, planted between two and eight years ago.

This means it will be cheaper, on average, for the village to remove each tree, and that when all the ash trees in Huntley are gone, the effect on the village's landscape won't be as dramatic as in other towns that have been built out for decades.

One positive the ash borer brings is that it will push towns to plant a more diverse array of tree species, instead of relying on a small number of low-maintenance, fast-growing varieties that leave towns susceptible to future scourges.

It's puzzling that it will take the ash borer for some municipalities to change their planting strategies. The ash borer is hardly the first parasite to annihilate an entire species of tree.

Let's hope when the next ash borer comes along, municipalities will be prepared - and better able to absorb the cost of replacing an entire species.