Less than eight hours after the Bend City Council voted Wednesday night to remove a tree leaning above a community garden, the Ponderosa pine at the corner of Northeast Eighth and Franklin was felled. Who cut it down is a mystery.

Mayor Jim Clinton said he received an email early Thursday from assistant city attorney Gary Firestone that explained the tree had not been cut by city crews, contractors working for the city, or by the company employed by Pacific Power to keep trees from interfering with its electrical lines.

Wednesday, councilors had voted to have the tree removed, following the advice of the city’s arborist, who contended it was at risk of toppling over. A private arborist and former city council candidate, Wade Fagen, had argued the tree was in no danger of falling on its own, while a company that had removed some smaller juniper trees from the community garden property had urged further study.

Clinton said he was shocked to learn the tree had been taken down in the night by “some rogue person with a chainsaw.”

“I guess I’d say I’m basically upset that someone would do that, and the reason is, that these trees are in the public right-of-way along sidewalks and streets,” Clinton said. “They belong to the people in the community, and people don’t have a right to go and cut them down or destroy them anymore than they do with any other public property.”

The tree that was cut was estimated to be 100 years old.

Clinton said over the next few months, the council will attempt to develop a better process for determining which public trees should be cut down and which ones should be left standing. The council makes such decisions today as the “tree board,” but Clinton said councilors generally lack the forestry background to effectively assess conflicting information provided to them by arborists.

A city tree board composed of appointed volunteers with expertise in trees and tree health is one possible solution, Clinton said.

The unauthorized tree cutting recalled the Crane Shed episode from 2004, Clinton said, when an aging building that had been a part of the Brooks-Scanlon lumber mill was torn down overnight without permits.

He said if the person behind the tree cutting is ever identified, he’ll be very curious to learn what the person’s thinking was.

“I do notice that there’s sort of a strain around here — growing up in Lakeview, I saw kind of the same strain there — that these guys in the government are a bunch of jerks so lets just take care of it ourselves,” Clinton said. “It’s kind of the Western, cowboy mentality.”