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|  The Flip Side to City Trees | Mass culling Stockton CA
Whilst it's all well and good having thousands of trees as the urban canopy ages the cost of maintenance let alone good tree health care skyrockets. Here's the situation for one city. Recordnet.com: Shameful neglect to blame for appalling loss of trees Quote:
June 08, 2008 6:00 AM
Stockton's trees are dying.
They are dying of mistletoe, blight and pests. City crews are cutting them down in record numbers because diseases have made them rickety and unsafe.
Most of all, Stockton's 135,000 city trees are dying of neglect. The five-year cycle of tree maintenance, which once kept trees healthy, is a thing of the past.
Quote: THE NEGLECTED FOREST
Besides being 15 to 17 years behind on routine tree maintenance, Stockton has a huge backlog of work, including:
• 313 trees needing removal
• 623 trees in urgent need of trimming
• 491 stumps awaiting removal
Source: City arborist's 2007-08 budget request | "The tree maintenance program is crashing," Parks Superintendent Chris Moreno warned in a 2007 memo.
Falling branches and toppling trees cause so many emergencies that city tree crews often have no time for maintenance. The maintenance cycle has been replaced with a death spiral.
Crews preoccupied with emergencies cannot perform maintenance. So more trees die, and there are more emergencies, leaving less time for maintenance.
Trees that should be saved - grand, mature specimens, including some of the city's iconic trees - are being left to wither as the urban forest decays en masse.
It's worse than you think. "Without the mistletoe abatement program this year, approximately 2,000 to 3,000 trees ... will die each year," a city arborist warned.
Three thousand trees from mistletoe alone. Counting other ailments and natural death, how many trees will die each year? Five thousand?
Councils have utterly failed to manage this crucial part of the city's fabric.
A Parks and Recreation Department staff report says 20,000 trees needed replacement or major repair in 1996. Most never got it. Since then, the backlog has grown.
"We're somewhere from 15 to 17 years back now," Moreno said.
So big is the backlog, so frequent the tree failures, even emergency responses are backlogged.
A giant Modesto ash split and crashed onto the Banbury Drive home of Jack and Jesse Little two weeks ago. Emergency crews took eight days to get there.
Jack Little called City Hall. "I had one girl telling me, 'Our parks come first. There are children playing.' I told her, 'Well, are parks paying taxes? Because I do, and I have since 1946.' "
Seeing the mistletoe-stricken Modesto ash lining his street dying bothers Little.
"It's going to affect our property value," he said. "I don't like it one bit."
Parks may come first, as the staffer told Little - but only after windstorms fell branches. In reality, park trees are dying at an appalling rate.
The city is cutting down almost half the trees in American Legion Park. Fully 102 out of 224 get the ax - the closest thing to a clear-cutting the city has seen since the Gold Rush.
Why? A city letter to Legion Park neighborhood residents explained some trees are old. Others have "structural defects." Still others suffer wood rot or mistletoe.
The letter left out a lot.
Half the trees are moribund because, over the years, decrepit trees were not replaced with new plantings.
The "structural defects" in the other half mostly were caused by untreated mistletoe and wood rot. Branches fell off, sometimes knocking off other branches, leaving trees asymmetrical. Imbalanced trees are deemed hazards.
The city has to destroy them because it neglected them. That, in a nutshell, is Stockton's current tree policy.
The city needs five tree crews, possibly six, plus occasional private contractors to properly tend its trees. Currently, the city fields only four crews.
Of the 14 tree surgeons and workers on those crews, four are currently on light duty - such as driving water trucks, not tree trimming - following workers' compensation claims. Overwork may be an issue.
"Right now we probably have four guys on light duty out of the 14," Moreno said. "And at any one time, it's up to seven."
The city also needs a one-time catch-up program to eliminate its backlog. Moreno said it would cost $2.2 million in 2007 - less than the $2.5 million subsidy given Paragary's restaurant.
There's a growing realization that the City Council has preferred redevelopment and growth over taking care of existing neighborhoods. Nothing illustrates this like the shameful neglect of Stockton's trees.
Contact columnist Michael Fitzgerald at (209) 546-8270 or michaelf@recordnet.com.
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9th June 2008, 09:51 AM
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