Tree emergency

On Saturday morning, downtown residents awoke to a grisly murder scene. Dozens of trees had been massacred in the dark of night. The damage was widespread and indiscriminate. A grove of majestic Ficus microcarpa that had cooled a busy bus stop for decades were all sawed cleanly in half. A row of Chinese elms that created a canopy for street vendors were lopped off parallel to the street, draping a gruesome pattern of leafy right triangles along the sidewalk. Entire blocks of shade had been eliminated overnight. It was, literally, a tree emergency.

I know the term because I've filed more than a few such requests on the city's 311 app. (Yes, there's a new app, and I'll be writing about it soon; I've been inputting some more challenging service requests to test how well it works.) In the last few weeks, I've reported a dead purple orchid tree shedding limbs on the sidewalk, a block of freshly planted desert willows that were leaning precariously after their stabilizing stakes had been removed, and perhaps most troubling, a set of three ficuses with their trunks layered in graffiti. I honestly don't even know how you triage that type of tree emergency. But I may not get to find out. So far, none of these tree emergencies have been addressed by city workers.

That's not the case with these felled trees downtown. With the work of the tree vandal on every local news channel, city workers were out there Monday morning clearing the carnage. "That someone would do this is truly beyond comprehension," read a statement from LA Mayor Karen Bass on Sunday. "City public works crews are assessing the damage and we will be making plans to quickly replace these damaged trees."

And then, on Monday, the mayor dropped her 2025 budget that included dramatic reductions in tree funding. The entire city's urban canopy is facing deep cuts.

In its attempt to close a $1 billion deficit, the mayor's budget is bleak, recommending the layoffs of 1,647 workers and the closure of entire departments. As Frank Stolze reported at LAist: "It's the most austere budget since the city was wracked by the 2008 recession." If you talk to anyone who works with trees in our city, they'll talk about how the 2008 recession decimated LA's urban forest. As budgets tighten, tree planting is reduced, but so is tree maintenance: watering, trimming, and pruning roots so they don't turn sidewalks into rubble. And that's exactly what happened after 2008. The situation got so bad that the city planned to cut down 12,000 trees so the ruptured sidewalks below them could be repaired — until a judge ordered the city to keep the trees and find a better way to fix the sidewalks.

When I read the city's 500-page budget each year — I'm a lot of fun at parties — the section I immediately turn to is "performance measures." It's one of the few places where you can easily see how the way the city invests money translates into real metrics that affect your day-to-day life. On this week's LA Podcast episode, you can hear me take a deep breath as I read how long it will take city workers to address a single streetlight outage under this proposed budget: 370 days, up from only 31 days in 2021.

A few lines below that I found a Street Tree and Parkway Maintenance line item. In 2021, the average number of days it took for city workers to address a tree emergency was 1. For the 2025 budget it's projected to take 4. For an emergency.

The Los Angeles Times' Ryan Fonseca did more tree budget math:

No new funding would be allocated for tree planting within the Office of Community Beautification

$170,000 is allocated for “tree care” in the StreetsLA budget, but no funding is listed for “new trees”

No new funding would be allocated to replace trees removed during sidewalk repairs

Seven open city positions tasked with planting trees and another seven tasked with watering them would be eliminated

Particularly after the January fires, these decisions are irresponsible, if not downright reckless. On the heels of the worst climate disaster in LA history, the city plans to zero-out one of its best tools to mitigate extreme heat. Boosting LA's tree budget would be the single most appropriate response to our current climate emergency. Although, perhaps unsurprisingly, the mayor's budget also eliminates the city's climate emergency commission.

But Bass did propose a stop-gap solution. In her State of the City address, Bass announced a new volunteer program called Shine LA, which will roll out citywide this Saturday. The goal is "cleaning, greening, and preparing our city for the world stage" — meaning: for upcoming megaevents; the World Cup is only 15 months away. "Every single month," she said, "we will bring Angelenos together side by side to unify and beautify our neighborhoods, improving communities and parks, planting trees, painting murals, and so much more."

I do want everyone reading this to get out there and plant a few trees with the mayor. But it's important to know that volunteers — meaning, you — already do the majority of the tree planting in the city of LA. And it might not surprise you to learn the neighborhoods with the healthiest canopies are the places where homeowners are planting and caring for them on their own properties. (I just received an advanced copy of Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource, the long-awaited book by Sam Bloch set to become the essential text on this topic.) That's why so many nonprofits are hard at work trying to eliminate those inequities. KYCC is doing an amazing job of targeting the hottest streets with tree-plantings in my neighborhood right now. But a similar effort by North East Trees just had its grant funding slashed by the Trump administration — because Elon Musk thought planting trees was too woke, not kidding — meaning least 2,000 trees planned for LA neighborhoods will go unplanted. Bass's volunteer program, could, hopefully, get some of those trees in the ground in the places that need them most.

But planting the tree is only the first small step. In this budget crisis era, LA still needs someone — a billionaire mall developer who wants to help LA recover from a disaster? a large nonprofit holding a major event here in three years? — to protect these trees once they're in the ground, for at least three or four years until they get established, and ideally, long after that. One year ago, I wrote about a pair of tree wells in my neighborhood where two gargantuan ficuses had been cut down — not by a chainsaw-wielding tree vandal, but by municipal workers repairing the sidewalk. Over the next five years, the city tried to replant the tree wells twice. All four trees died. Last year, I wrote, I finally thought a new pair of pink trumpet trees were going to make it. Then, a few months ago, I noticed that these trees were gone too. It was not on the local news. There was no statement from the mayor. But for the people who wait for the bus on that corner, it remains an emergency. 🔥