Lenexa Tree Removal has worked trees across Johnson County for more than twenty years, and tree removal in Overland Park is the one place on this site where the price of the work is a matter of public record before we ever quote it. In September 2024 the city opened sealed bids on a contract to take down 1,717 street ash trees. Three companies priced identical work, and the highest number came in at 2.09 times the lowest.
That tabulation is the clearest public evidence anywhere in this metro of how far removal pricing spreads on the same scope, and it is worth reading before you collect a single quote on your own tree. It does not mean two of the three bidders got it wrong. It means the work carries real variables, and that two defensible numbers on the same trees can sit a long way apart.
What we can tell you is how our own number gets built. Every estimate we write names the tree, the method and exactly what cleanup is included, and it is priced against what that particular tree is doing rather than against a clock. Proof of insurance is handed over before a saw comes off the truck, and where a tree can be saved instead of removed we say so and price both paths. The rest of this page is the arithmetic behind that.
What Overland Park put out to bid in September 2024
The city ran the job as project MP-2908, the 2025 ARPA-Funded Ash Street Tree Removal, and opened bids on September 10, 2024 for 1,717 trees under one contract. Overland Park has removed more than 8,000 ash trees citywide, so this was not a first attempt at the problem but another tranche of an established program, priced by contractors who already knew the ground and the species. A bid tabulation is a plain document: the scope is fixed, the bidders are named, and the numbers sit next to one another in a column.
Three bids, one scope, and a 2.09 spread
Arbor Masters bid $516,032, which works out to roughly $300 a tree. Kansas City Tree Care bid $597,350 for the same 1,717 trees. Looks Great Services of Mississippi bid $1,080,000, or roughly $629 a tree, putting the high bid at 2.09 times the low bid on a scope written the same way for all three. Nothing about the trees changed between those three envelopes.
What a spread that wide is not
It is not evidence that anyone padded a number, and it is not a reason to assume the low bidder planned to cut something. Crew size, equipment already owned, haul distance, disposal arrangements and appetite for a contract of that size differ from one company to the next, and across 1,717 trees those differences compound into six figures. What makes the document useful to a homeowner is not the winner but the range, published in a column rather than argued about in a driveway.
Why the volume existed in the first place
The species is the reason a city ever has 1,717 near-identical removals to put out to bid. Emerald ash borer is why more than 8,000 ash have come out of Overland Park, and the Johnson County K-State Research and Extension brochure of recommended landscape trees for this metro had already moved green ash onto its not-recommended list on the strength of that insect. The same brochure is stale on pest status, still reading as though the borer had not yet reached Kansas or Missouri, so its planting advice and its pest reporting are two separate facts and only one of them aged well. Its bridging sentence aged fine: many fast growing varieties are brittle with narrow crotch angles that can lead to severe breakage during storms.
Looking for tree-removal closer to Bonner Springs? See Tree-Removal in Bonner Springs.
What roughly $300 a tree buys when there are 1,717 of them
A street tree is usually the easiest thing this trade takes down. Most of them stand in the right-of-way with a curb on one side and open lawn on the other, no fence to protect, no pool to cover, no gate too narrow for a chipper to fit through. A crew works a route rather than a yard, so a bucket truck, a chipper and a grapple loader move down the block and take the next stem without breaking the setup down, and mobilization is spread across a contract holding 1,717 units instead of charged once against one tree.
The right-of-way tree is the City Forester’s call
There is a legal half to that as well as an economic one. Section 7.16.195 of the Overland Park Municipal Code gives the City Forester authority to regulate the planting, maintenance and removal of trees on public property, and where removal of a right-of-way tree is determined necessary the City Forester directs city staff or the city’s contractor to perform it, with no notice to the abutting owner required. The city’s own street trees page states the other side of it directly: removing a tree from the right-of-way is prohibited unless authorized by the City Forester. Section 7.16.180 sets an approved street tree list governing what may be planted out there, and that list stops at the curb.
Why a volume unit price is a floor and not a quote
Read roughly $300 a tree as the cheapest removal can be done in this city under the most favorable conditions anyone will ever assemble: one species, roadside access, 1,717 units of volume and a public agency’s payment terms. A single tree behind a house has none of those advantages, and the work in front of the crew is not the same work. The figure is a floor rather than a price list, and we will not quote your tree off that document, but knowing where the floor sits tells you something real about a number that lands near it and something equally real about one that does not.
What actually moves the number on a single residential tree
Strip out the route, the volume and the clear access and what is left is what a residential quote is actually made of: what stands under the tree, what a crew can get next to it, what the wood is doing structurally, and what happens to the stump. Those four decide the number far more than diameter alone ever does. None of them read off a photograph, which is why somebody comes and looks.
Access, and the two halves of this city
Overland Park is the largest city in Johnson County and the second-most populous in Kansas, with a 2020 census population of 197,238, and it did not go up all at once. Roughly 11,105 housing units date from the 1960s and 6,813 from the 1950s, most of them in the northern third of the city on narrower plats under decades of established canopy, while much of the southern edge was built after 2010. In the north a removal is often a crane or spider lift pick between close houses. In the south it is more often the first real failure of a tree that went in with the house.
The tree itself
Diameter at breast height is where a quote starts and nowhere near where it ends. Codominant stems with included bark change the rigging plan, because the union a climber would normally work off is itself the defect. A hollow or long-dead trunk takes climbing off the table altogether, which is what puts a crane, a grapple saw or a lift on the job and moves the price with it. We rig to ANSI Z133 and prune to ANSI A300, and where the honest answer is crown reduction and cabling rather than removal we put both on the same sheet.
The stump, and what is under it
Every stump gets a Kansas 811 locate before a cutting wheel turns, at 811 or 1-800-DIG-SAFE. Depth is the honest unknown, because this is Osage Cuestas ground of alternating limestone and shale benches rather than the deep loess-derived soils common elsewhere in this metro. The Vinland series is described as 25 to 51 centimeters of solum over interbedded sandy and silty shale, which is 10 to 20 inches, while Oska carries 51 to 102 centimeters over residuum derived from limestone and shale, so on one the rock stops the machine and on the other it brackets it. In the newest subdivisions the working medium is imported fill and compacted subgrade rather than mapped soil, which changes the grinding and the root plate both.
Reading three quotes on your own driveway
The tabulation earns its place on this page for one practical reason: it proves that a wide gap between honest numbers is ordinary, so the gap on its own tells you nothing until you check what each number covers. Three quotes are only three quotes when they describe the same job. Most of the spread that alarms people closes the moment the sheets are lined up side by side.
Make the three sheets describe the same job
Ask each company to write down the tree, the method, the debris and the stump. A number that leaves grinding out, or that leaves brush stacked at the curb for somebody else to deal with, is not comparable to one that includes both, and a figure with none of it named is closer to a guess with a dollar sign in front. Ours says what the crew will do and what leaves with us, and the debris does leave with us, with the site handed back rakeable.
The credential to ask for, and the one to stop asking for
Kansas does not license tree work and neither does Johnson County, whose contractor program covers construction, alteration, repair or demolition of structures across eleven classes, none of which reaches arboriculture. Overland Park issues no contractor license of its own and requires the county credential in order to issue a building permit, which a residential tree removal does not need. So the words worth asking for are insured and certified rather than licensed: the Kansas Forest Service names both the International Society of Arboriculture and the Kansas Arborists Association, and a Tree Risk Assessment Qualification is what sits behind a written hazard opinion.
The last variable is time, and it is the one nobody puts out to bid. A tree already down on a house, a car, a drive or a power service gets a same-day answer from us, and on a downed line Evergy’s own instruction comes first: call 911, then call Evergy at 888-544-4852. Our crews are local and drive local roads to reach you, and we work both sides of State Line Road knowing the rules change when you cross it.
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