Remember the trees

The Arbor Day Foundation’s Tree City USA designation may not seem hugely important, but it is a point of pride for Chico and most certainly has buoyed the community’s appreciation for the 28,000-plus city trees.

According to the national nonprofit organization, the Tree City program has many benefits, including providing cities with the opportunity to educate the community on the value of the urban forest. Additionally, its standards help establish the framework for municipalities to manage their tree inventories.

As you’ll read in Newslines this week (see “Tree City snafu,” by Ken Smith, page 9), city of Chico officials forgot to apply for the annual recognition—in what would be the city’s 30th year as an official Tree City. Whoops. Meanwhile, Oroville, a Tree City for 34 consecutive years, has its designation in hand.

Chico officials are currently working on rectifying that oversight and maintaining the longstanding honor. They are confident that, despite the loss of a tree crew—a casualty of recent sweeping budget cuts—the city will qualify for the designation.

However, this blunder underscores the scant resources dedicated to an attribute that many residents would argue is one of the top reasons Chico is such a beautiful and livable city. Indeed, the former four-employee tree crew was axed in favor of contracting out tree maintenance to outside firms, the city’s former urban-forest manager retired and has not been replaced, and a draft version of the city’s Urban Forest Management Plan is sitting on a shelf awaiting adoption.

City officials cannot rest on their laurels when it comes to maintaining the urban forest. The canopy may not be immediately imperiled, but over time, without the careful consideration the trees have seen for many decades, it most certainly will suffer. When the city’s economic outlook improves, reinstating positions that maintain the trees should be a top priority.