✂️ 61,124 Reasons to Improve Tree Maintenance in NYC

🌟 Author’s Note

Hello and welcome to the 2 new advocates of the Better Block Project, bringing our group to 92 members strong 💪 

📣 Join Us Today:

We’re doing our Better Block Community Meet Up from 3-5pm today @ First Quincy Street Community Garden (397 Quincy Street, Quincy & Tompkins). We’ll meet, connect with new neighbors and discuss what we need to amplify the work we’re doing. We should have attendees from community organizations, block associations and advocates just looking to do more work in their neighborhoods. Drinks and fruit will be provided! Thanks again to Ris for lending us the space.

✂️ 61,124 Reasons to Improve Tree Maintenance in NYC

Following our work to remove a Wasp’s Nest in Williamsburg, we’ve been actively engaging with community members and City Council to develop policy to improve street tree maintenance in New York. We’ve already heard from many neighbors about the lack of care of street trees on their block and how this has impacted them. Here are some stories:

• Trees covering up streetlights 🔦 , limiting the light that can come through at night

• Overgrown trees brushing up against property, and even a 🐿️ squirrel that came in through a window

• Lack of resources to prune trees, with some neighbors citing they’ve never seen Parks come by to trim their tree

• Tree roots causing sidewalk and plumbing damage, which often has to be repaired at the owner’s expense

This week, we also dug into 311 data over the past year to get a sense for the scope of the problem in New York City as a whole. In the last 12 months, there have been 61,124 311 complaints about trees to the Park’s department across 41,622 unique locations. For context, New York has ~666,000 street trees, meaning roughly 6% of those trees are driving a complaint, and this is only what’s reported. 311 also gives us visibility into what these complaints are about:

Damaged trees represent the largest share, with 26,000+ complaints in the last year, followed by overgrown tree branches, which represent over 18,000 complaints. We can also see the resolution (or lack thereof) of each of these complaints.

35% of the issues are still in progress, of which ~6,000 of those have no next step associated with them. Of the 65% of issues that are closed, 10,000+ of those issues Parks decided not to take any action. This is a common story we hear from neighbors, where either Parks has decided the issue isn’t serious enough for them to do work or they share that it will be addressed in the next pruning cycle (which happens every 7 years).

The impact of these complaints is an overall feeling from neighbors that trees aren’t being taken care of. It also costs New York City (aka taxpayers) money. Last year, Parks had $12.7M in legal claims they had to pay in settlements due to personal injury or property damage.

🧑‍⚖️ Next Steps with Tree Maintenance Legislation

We’re continuing to engage with both the offices of Councilmember (CM) Gutierrez and Councilmember (CM) Nantasha Williams about sponsoring legislation. We met with the team from Councilmember Nantasha Williams this week, and aligned on coordinating an internal meeting with the Parks department as a next steps to diagnose the issue. We’re planning to coordinate the meeting with both CMs to raise awareness of the issue among community members and get feedback on our proposals.

We published a draft version of our tree maintenance legislation here on a public site that anyone can access, which aims to establish a simpler permitting process for individuals to make improvements on their own. We welcome any feedback on this, so feel free to reply with any thoughts!

Finally, we’re filing a Freedom of Information request with the city to get more information about tree maintenance, as ideally, the city can fund and manage these improvements on their own. These are our questions:

• How often are trees pruned? Current estimate is 7 years

• How many injuries have been caused by street trees annually?

• What is the block pruning budget on an annual basis? How much does it cost per tree (~666,000 street trees)?

• How much does Parks spend on street-tree related legal claims per year?

• How many permit applications are received per year? How long does it take for a permit to be approved to do work? What is the current process today (including headcount)?

We will follow up after we have the discussion with Parks. We’re currently aiming to get legislation passed in the next 12 months.

⏳ Where we are on the other problems we’re working on

• 🚌 Improving the Bus Stop on Franklin and Fulton: We followed up this week with the Detective regarding adding the lights to the area, but have not heard back. We’ve also not heard back regarding the meeting with MTA to remove the bus stop. We’re going to follow up with both this week to ensure the situation at the bus stop improves, and if not, we will plan to attend the next Community Board 3 meeting in early October to advocate for faster improvements.

• 🏠️ Improving Vacant Buildings on Fulton, Jefferson and Macon: While 26 Jefferson restarted construction, unfortunately, they continue to do the construction in an unsafe manner. As a result, the building now has a new Stop Work Order and $7,500 in additional fines (bringing the total to ~$88,000). It’s unfortunate these builders continue to operate in an unsafe manner, but the silver lining is DOB is acting quickly to levy enforcement on the property. We’re hopeful this latest round of enforcement will cause them to improve their behavior.

• 🧹 Cleaning up Trash on Fulton Street: We still have not heard back on the budget request meeting to clean up Fulton Street, which is candidly frustrating. It sheds light on how hard it is to truly solve these problems that fester for so many years. We’re going to follow up again next week to try to get this scheduled.

• 🌳 Building a Park: We received positive feedback from multiple neighbors on the opportunity to build a park, as well as multiple new lot ideas. We also got connected to the Brooklyn Queens Land Trust and GreenThumb, to explore what it means to create a community garden. Our next step is to continue to call lots to try to identify the right lot to build a park.

That’s all for this week’s update. Hope to see many of you at our meet up tomorrow! If you like what we’re doing here, please share betterblockproject.com with other community members you know who are looking to drive change in Brooklyn. The larger our community, the bigger our impact.

See you next week,

David