AUBURN – A project that started out helping people stay warm this winter could end up helping the city’s urban forest stay healthy.

Councilors reviewed a plan to use revenue from the Community Cords wood sale program to help maintain the city’s trees once the program has been up and running for a year. The first year’s proceeds will be used to help the city’s needy purchase wood, pellets or heating oil. After that, half of the revenue would go to needy residents and half would be used to plant new trees and maintain the city’s greenery.

“And that’s important because that’s what we set out to do with this program,” Mayor John Jenkins said. “But we do want to maintain and take care of our urban forests as well.”

Doug Beck, Auburn’s recreation superintendent, said those revenues and a grant from the LA Fund to study the city’s trees and inventory them will help insure that the city has a healthy forest for years to come.

“Instead of waiting for trees to fall and then cleaning them up, we’d be able to maintain them and keep them healthy before they’d become a problem,” Beck said.

Councilors came up with the Community Cords program this summer as a way to help needy people pay for heat. The idea was to cut wood from the city-owned lots and sell it on the open market.

The city sold roughly 50 cords of wood cut by city arborists throughout the summer to a local firewood dealer in November. Most of that was wood taken from street trees, usually too large to be useful for firewood and often studded with nails and staples.

But Beck said the city has acres of good trees for harvesting that could bring a good price. Some would be good for firewood while others would be better sold to make wood pulp.

“It’s important before you can begin selling the wood to know what you have and where it is,” Beck said. “You can’t really do anything until you have a proper inventory.”

The LA Fund offered to pay up to $7,500 for a city-wide forest management plan if the city agreed to match that amount and pay for a street-by-street inventory of trees.

Beck said the city had planned to pay for both the plan and the inventory. Southern Maine Forestry, a logging and forest management group, bid $5,900 to do the study.

“We already have $5,000 budgeted to pay for the tree inventory,” Beck said. “What this does is let the LA Fund pay for the study, we pay for the inventory and we save significantly.”

The city would begin negotiating with harvesters to sell some of the city’s forest once the study is complete. All of that revenue will go to the Community Cords heating program for the first year. After that, revenue will be split between Community Cords and the city’s forestry program. Half will go to heat homes, 30 percent will be used to plant new trees where they’ve been harvested and 20 percent will go toward tree planting and maintenance city-wide.