Answered for Fishers, Hamilton County.
The cambium — the living layer just under the bark that builds new wood and moves food down to the roots — was killed in that patch, and the tree is now conducting around a dead strip. A narrow strip gets grown over in a few seasons and leaves a scar. A strip that wraps far enough around leaves the tree partly girdled, and the crown above it thins as the remaining live tissue gets overloaded. Either way the exposed wood becomes an open invitation to borers and canker fungi that would not touch intact bark. In Fishers — Sunblest Farms, Avalon and Brooks Chase included, that's normally a tree trimming job at $250–$1,400. Not urgent.
Fishers had 344 residents in 1960 and 2,008 in 1980; it grew 404% in the 1990s alone, from 7,508 to 37,835, and reached 98,977 by 2020. Outside the original Fisher's Switch village platted in 1872 there is essentially no pre-1980 housing stock, so the canopy is a single planted cohort roughly 20 to 35 years old — first-generation subdivision trees all hitting the wires, the roofline and the sidewalk at once.
Fishers was not one of the 23 communities in Indiana DNR's street-tree sample inventory, so no verified species breakdown exists for the city. What is documented is that the Tree Board maintains a list of desirable and undesirable species and no species off that list may be planted as a street tree without special permission — the practical picture being a 1990s-2000s nursery palette in tight uniform age classes, with ash gone since EAB was confirmed in Indiana in 2004.
Fishers regulates street trees, not yard trees. Under section 95.33 you need a Tree Board permit to plant, treat, spray or prune a street tree, and a separate permit to remove one, with no permit required in a genuine emergency; permits are reported to run up to 60 days with a 30-day extension on written request. Section 95.34 bars planting in any public right-of-way, required landscape easement or municipal property without a permit, and bars planting within 15 horizontal feet of an overhead utility line or five feet of an underground one. The trap is the definition: STREET TREES covers trees on real estate owned or controlled by the city AND trees within a dedicated landscape easement, which sweeps in subdivision frontage that looks like private yard. Removing a tree standing entirely in a private yard needs no permit. Section numbers, permit durations and setbacks here should be confirmed against the current Fishers code before they are relied on.
This is where Fishers diverges sharply from Indianapolis. Section 95.02 puts maintenance and removal of the tree between the street and the sidewalk or right-of-way easement line on the owner of the adjacent property, and if that owner fails to remove a dead tree or dangerous limbs after notice, the city removes them and bills the owner. But the code points both directions on cost — 95.34(D) commits the city to street tree care within the Tree Board's budget while 95.34(F) assigns owners routine care between road surface and sidewalk. Call the Department of Permitting and Inspection before assuming who pays for a removal.
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Distance measured from Fishers.