save the pine trees at Mesa's Riverview Golf Course and park

The trees will probably be moved throughout the next three months to your temporary nursery near to the nearby water-treatment plant ahead of the hilly golf course's terrain is graded for construction of a Chicago Cubs training complex and a reconfigured Riverview Park.

Mayor Scott Smith said the elements this winter never got cold enough for the pines to travel dormant, and also the unusually hot weather this spring is making the problem worse.

"The weather didn't cooperate,'' Smith said. "As much as I would like to save everybody whenever we could, we need to take care of Taylormade R11 irons."

Ross Renner, Mesa's project engineer, said the city is focusing on the saving the trees most likely to outlive.

"We've picked the healthiest ones," Renner said. "We don't want to spend money on a tree that will die."

He was quoted saying the city hopes to save lots of at the very least 200 trees, including 100 pines and an assortment of desert trees including mesquite, paloverde or a few saguaros.

Renner estimated about one-third of the course's 600 roughly trees is going to be salvaged in a unique work for Mesa.

Saving the last remnant of Riverview Course will still only result in the new Cubs complex all the more appealing, Renner said.

"You provide site some instant maturity. You've some nice big trees instantly," he was quoted saying.

Smith said he wants a natural project, not really a stadium encompassed by a huge expanse of asphalt. Fans would park on Taylormade R11 driver newly reconfigured softball fields east in the new stadium.

Paul delaTorre, project manager for Agave Environmental, said he learned playing golf at Riverview like a young man, and he can do everything easy to save the pines.

Crews started excavating the trees late this week and in all likelihood begins moving them in about 3 weeks. The operation is time-consuming, with workers encasing the basis structure in a wooden box with metal bands, he explained.

The goal is to stabilize the tree within the box and get away from having it die from your shock of getting its roots cut. The trees will likely be carted using a front-end loader towards the temporary nursery, where they shall be watered for about annually and replanted in the event the other landscaping is installed late in 2013.

"There's a small percentage projects with pine trees to salvage," delaTorre said. Almost all of the company's salvage work involves citrus trees, saguaros and desert trees.

The newest stadium and practice fields are scheduled to open for spring training in February 2014. The baseball complex's price is capped at $84 million, with infrastructure improvements swelling the fee to $99 million.

Voters approved the project in order to avoid the Cubs, Mesa's primary tourist attraction, from relocating to discount golf clubs Naples, Fla. The location is negotiating with all the Oakland Athletics for new tenant for Hohokam Stadium.

The tree salvaging project is budgeted at $424,000. Although the trees planned for salvaging are marked with red or blue ribbons and metal tags, it's impossible to express whether a tree can be saved until it is taken off the bottom and the root structure is evaluated, delaTorre said.

Trees growing on the steep hill, for example, can be impossible to transplant as their roots are oddly shaped and hard to surround in a very box, he stated.