Shawnee Tree Removal has been doing tree removal in Basehor for more than twenty years, and the rule that governs the work here is newer than most of the trees we take down. Ordinance No. 946 was passed by the City Council and approved by the Mayor on February 12, 2025, and it rewrote Chapter 38, Article II, Division 2 of the city code, Secs. 38-57 through 38-65, whole.
What that division leaves out matters as much as what it contains. There is no removal permit for a tree on private property, no application to file, no trunk-diameter threshold, no replacement table and no tree fund anywhere in it. The pressure runs the other way instead: the code names the owner as the party who has to take a dangerous tree down, and gives the city the right to take it down if the owner will not.
So the real questions in Basehor are not whether you may remove the tree. They are how much clear space the street is owed, who has to be on the locate before a grinder turns, and where a few thousand pounds of trunk goes afterward. Our on-site assessment is free, and the figure we quote is the figure you get in writing.
What the February 2025 rewrite puts on the owner
The section that does the work is Sec. 38-60. Subsection (a) tells every owner of a tree overhanging a street or right-of-way in Basehor to prune the branches so they do not obstruct the light from a street lamp or the view of a street intersection, and so that there is a clear space of 14 feet above the surface of the street or right-of-way. The same subsection tells owners to remove all dead, diseased or dangerous trees, or broken or decayed limbs, which constitute a menace to the safety of the public.
Subsection (b) is where the code stops asking. It gives the city the right to cause the removal of any dangerous, dead or diseased trees in their entirety on private property when those trees constitute a hazard to life and property or a public nuisance. Sit with that phrase for a second: the remedy the code reaches for is the whole tree, not a pruning order on one bad limb.
How a tree gets called diseased
Sec. 38-58 lays out the route. A competent city, state or federal authority files a statement with the city’s designated public officer, with supporting evidence, that trees, tree materials or shrubs on private property are infected or infested, or harbor insects or larvae whose uncontrolled spread could damage other trees in the community. The officer then issues a notice requiring the owner or the owner’s agent to treat or remove within a time named in that notice.
Wood cut under that notice does not stay in the yard
Sec. 38-59 is headed Destruction or Removal of Diseased Material, and it closes on a purpose clause about preventing the spread of tree disease. Read the natural way, scoped to the disease-control machinery it sits inside, it says material cut down is to be treated, removed and burned, or burned on the premises if that is safe to do. A removal carried out under a diseased-tree notice cannot finish with the trunk stacked behind the garage for next winter’s firewood.
Looking for tree-service closer to Overland Park? See Tree-Service in Overland Park.
Notices, property lines, and ten feet around a hydrant
An ignored order turns into a charge against the lot
Sec. 38-64 does not let the city open in municipal court. A complaint may be filed only after an order has been sent and the person has neither alleviated the condition nor asked for a hearing within the time specified; conviction then carries a fine of not less than $50.00 or more than $100.00, or imprisonment for not more than 30 days, or both, with each day counted as a separate offense.
Sec. 38-65 is the parallel civil track. The city’s public officer may present a resolution authorizing abatement, effective at the end of ten days after its passage, and the costs of that abatement are charged against the lot or parcel. Notice goes out by personal service, by certified mail with return receipt requested, or by publication once a week for two consecutive weeks together with a posting on the premises.
The cut made on the wrong side of a line
Sec. 38-62 is the one homeowners trip over. It forbids willfully breaking, cutting, taking away, destroying, injuring or mutilating any tree, shrub, vine, flower or landscaping standing, growing or being upon the premises in the possession of another. Kansas case law separately allows a neighbor to trim back to the property line without entering, while treating a tree that does substantial harm or creates imminent danger as a nuisance the owner can be compelled to abate.
Kansas and Missouri do not resolve the neighbor’s tree the same way, and after two decades working both sides of State Line Road we can tell you which answer governs at your address. Where a boundary is in play we hand over a written condition assessment you can give a neighbor or an adjuster, rather than a number scribbled on a card.
Hydrants, streetlights and sight lines
Sec. 38-63 keeps a ten-foot circle open: no shrub, tree or planting of any kind within ten feet of a fire hydrant, so every hydrant stays in full view day or night to apparatus approaching from any direction. Sec. 38-60(a) also reserves the city’s own right to prune a tree or shrub on private property where it interferes with the spread of light from a streetlight or with the visibility of a traffic control device or sign.
Where a Basehor trunk actually goes
The city’s own gate stops at four inches
Basehor runs a brush dump at its Municipal Services Department, 2300 N. 158th Street, open 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Monday through Friday excluding holidays, plus the second Saturday of each month from 8 a.m. to noon. The city posts it for Basehor city-limit residents only, and the size rule is the same one that governs the curb: branches and limbs cut into 4-foot lengths with a diameter of 4 inches or less, bundles tied to no more than 18 inches across or 65 pounds, and no dirt, rocks or mulch.
Set that against an actual removal and the arithmetic is unkind. The butt log of a mature shade tree is several times the four-inch cap, and cutting it shorter does nothing to its diameter. The curb is no help either, since yard waste there goes into the trash cart in paper lawn bags only, with stickers bought for anything past what the cart holds.
The county route, and the gate that is closed to you
Basehor sits in Leavenworth County, so the route for a real load is the Leavenworth County Transfer Station at 300 Walnut Street in Leavenworth, open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. It takes brush described as tree and bush trimmings, which have to be free of trash and processed wood, for a fee, and it turns processed wood away at the scale. We will not quote you a figure off that fee sheet we have not read ourselves.
The free Wyandotte County recycling and yard waste center is not an alternative from a Basehor address, because it asks for proof of Wyandotte County residency at the gate. Being one county over is the whole reason, and it is the sort of thing a homeowner only discovers after the truck is already loaded.
What we do with it
Every stick leaves with us. Before the saw comes out of the truck we tell you where the wood and the grindings are going, so nothing ends up piled at a curb the city has already said it will not collect.
What we check before the first cut
The water main under your yard is not the city’s
Basehor takes electric from Evergy and gas from Atmos Energy, the city handles sewer and trash, and water comes from Consolidated Rural Water or Suburban Water rather than a municipal water department. That changes who owns the pipe crossing your front yard and who has to be on the locate, which is why the answer here is Kansas 811 every time, without exception, before a stump grinder’s tooth wheel drops below grade.
We also will not promise a below-grade cut depth before we have looked at the stump. Well over half of this city’s housing postdates 2000, and on a lot graded in that era the working medium in the top two feet is imported fill and compacted subgrade rather than anything a soil map would describe.
Licensing, said plainly
Basehor requires contractors and subcontractors to be licensed through the Contractors Licensing Program of Johnson County, a county Basehor is not in, and every class in that program is a building class. None of them reaches tree work, so we will never tell you we hold one. What does apply to a tree service is the city’s own business license at $50.00 a year, running January 1 through December 31, with another $50.00 added to an application filed after January 31. Proof of insurance reaches you before a crew sets foot on the property.
Lines, storms, and the trees this city planted at once
The service drop from the pole to your meter is the customer’s responsibility, which makes that limb a private crew’s job rather than Evergy’s. Where a tree is into the primary conductors, Evergy comes first, clears limbs within ten feet of energized conductors and leaves the debris at the worksite, so you still need somebody for the cleanup and for whatever is left standing. Nobody, us included, works near energized conductors during a thunderstorm or high wind; the Z133 safety standard is explicit about it.
Roughly a third of the houses here went up between 2000 and 2009, which means the trees in those yards were planted together and are reaching their brittle years together. The K-State Extension list for metropolitan Kansas City is blunt about the cultivar that defines that cohort, telling homeowners not to plant the Bradford because severe splitting shows up on ten- to fifteen-year-old trees. We do not top trees, and where cabling or structural pruning saves one worth saving we will say so and price that instead of a removal. When a tree is on a roof, a car or a service line, you get us the same day.
- 20+ Years in Johnson County
- Insured, Proof Sent First
- Free On-Site Assessment
