Answered for Avon, Hendricks County.
The living layer that carries sugar down to the roots sits directly under the bark, so bark loss on a young tree is not cosmetic. If the damage runs most of the way around, the roots are cut off from their food supply and the tree dies from the bottom up over the following season or two — often after leafing out normally once first. If the stripped area is on one side only, the tree walls it off and grows around it, and the lasting consequence is a permanent weak point in the trunk rather than a death sentence. In Avon — Avon Heights, Beechwood Farms and Harvest Ridge included, that's normally a tree removal job at $400–$1,900. Not urgent.
Three electric utilities serve one town and which one you have depends on your address — Avon's own utility page lists Duke Energy, Hendricks Power Cooperative and AES Indiana. Hendricks Power's contracted crews work annually to ANSI A300 pruning standards, set clearance by species growth rate, give members wood chips on request, and supplement mechanical trimming with EPA-approved herbicide. Because Hendricks Power is a cooperative it is not bound by the IURC's 25%-removal, no-topping and two-week-notice rules that cover Duke and AES customers on the next street over.
Overwhelmingly young, nursery-planted stock: only 3.4% of Avon's housing predates 1960, so the typical "big tree" here is a 20-to-30-year-old subdivision planting rather than a legacy shade tree, with exceptions in the White Lick Creek bottomland and the fencerow remnants left when farm fields were platted. Ash is gone, and Avon's street tree ordinance actively steers right-of-way planting toward tall shade-producing species, reserving ornamentals for spots where space genuinely prevents a large tree.
Avon is the outlier: it has a real street tree ordinance (Town Code Article 14, Sec. 6-196). No permit is needed for a tree entirely on private property, but you may not remove — or trim more than one-fifth of — a tree in the public right-of-way without written permission from the Tree Advisory Committee and Staff Project Coordinator. The permit is free to property owners and valid 30 days. Topping a right-of-way tree is flatly unlawful except for storm-damaged trees or utility-line situations approved by the committee. Fines run $500 for unpermitted removal, $100 for trimming, planting or damaging, and $50 for attaching objects, plus up to $3,000 per tree in damages. Town departments and utilities and their contractors are exempt.
The ordinance defines the "Tree Lawn" — the strip between curb or pavement edge and the property line — as public property. But Section 6 makes the abutting property owner ultimately responsible for planting, removal, and keeping right-of-way vegetation from becoming a hazard, and the Town Council can call on the owner to do it. The town may also plant, prune or remove there itself, and must give the underlying owner two weeks' written notice before removing a right-of-way tree unless it's an immediate hazard. Vegetation over the street must be cleared to 14 feet above the curb.
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Distance measured from Avon.