✂️🌳 City Council Offices Respond To Better Tree Maintenance

🌟 Author’s Note

Hello to the 79 members of the Better Block Project. Thank you for all the hard work you do to keep Brooklyn thriving 💪 

As a reminder, we’re two weeks away from our Sidewalk Art Installation to raise awareness about cleaning up Fulton Street! We made a flier this week so please RSVP here if you can attend, and reply to this email if you’d like to volunteer to help put together the event.

✂️ City Council Offices Respond To Better Tree Maintenance

This week we received interest from a legislative fellow with City Council member Nantasha Williams and the office of City Council member Jennifer Gutierrez about sponsoring a bill to improve tree maintenance 🌳. As some background, Jennifer Gutierrez represents part of Williamsburg, the location of our original Wasp nest problem, which inspired this legislative effort. Nantasha Williams has sponsored a number of pieces of legislation related to tree maintenance (a law regarding cleaning up fallen tree limbs and another law develop criteria to maintain trees), so I reached out to her office a few weeks ago when we started exploring this new policy. Both offices noted that lack of consistent city tree maintenance is a problem they hear about often from their constituents, so they are excited to work with us on a bill to fix this. For next steps, we’re planning to work with both offices over the next few months to develop the new policy that we think would better serve residents. Today, I wanted to share some initial thoughts on what that policy could be to get feedback from the Better Block Project community.

🔭 But First, Let’s Talk About The Constraints We Have to Navigate

There are multiple constraints we have to consider to ensure whatever we propose will actually get passed and truly solve our tree maintenance problem:

1. NYC Parks has a Tight Budget (and a Big Responsibility)

2. We Have to Protect the Trees (and People Trying to Trim Them)

💵 NYC Parks has a Tight Budget (and a Big Responsibility)

As a reminder, the trees on your street are owned by the city of New York (and therefore all of us as tax payers!) and it’s technically their responsibility to maintain them. However, as we noted in a prior post, New York City has over 🌳 666,134 street trees they need to maintain. That’s a lot of trees! In addition to this, the NYC Parks budget has been cut for multiple years to $580M from $600-$650 million a few years ago, according to City and State. In the interview, New Yorkers for Parks Executive Director, Adam Ganser, states, “The entire forestry department, which cares for all the city’s parks as well as it’s street trees, has been underfunded for decades.” What’s the outcome of this? NYC Parks only has enough resources to prune block trees once every 7 years.

One solution to this is to give NYC Parks more budget so they have the resources to actually prune all the trees in a timely manner. While that seems straightforward, it would involve either taking funding from another program, raises taxes to fund more tree maintenance, or waiting until the budget naturally grows (driven by economic growth in NYC) to properly fund NYC Parks. This may be the right answer, but let’s look at all the other options before we stop here.

🛡️ We Have to Protect the Trees (and People Trying to Trim Them)

My first inclination to fix this tree maintenance problem was to just let people trim trees on their own #diy. While this would give blocks the most control, it’s worth noting that tree pruning is complicated. Here is what the Assistant Commissioner of Forestry and Horticulture had to say:

“I would emphasize that pruning is very technical, and if done improperly can cause permanent harm to trees. More importantly, it can be dangerous, even for trained workers, but more so for laypersons”

This makes sense to me. New York’s street trees are beautiful and regardless of the policy we come up with, we should ensure they are well taken care of. And, if you watched the Wasp removal video, it’s pretty obvious this can be a dangerous activity.

⚖️ What’s The Right Policy

We need to write a new policy that makes it easier for tree maintenance to happen, protects the trees and operates within the current realities of New York City budget (so it doesn’t cost a lot of money!). Below are some initial ideas we have:

• Simplifying the Approval Process: Today, if you want tree work done, you have to go through a robust permitting process that involves architectural plans and consulting an arborist. While this permitting might make sense for a large scale property development, it doesn’t work for someone who just wants to trim a low hanging branch or remove a wasp’s nest. NYC Parks should introduce a streamlined permitting process for smaller tree work. If you are just looking to trim a small branch, you should be able to get approved online to do so in less than 30 minutes

• Pre-Approve Businesses for Tree Maintenance & Better Market Citizen Pruners: NYC Parks already has a great Citizen Pruner program in partnership with Trees New York, where you can both learn to prune yourself or reach out to request a pruner. Unfortunately, no one knows about this program so it wasn’t recommended when we tried to take down the Wasp’s nest (even from NYC Parks themselves 🙃). Information on this will soon be included on every 311 request, but they should continue to market this program more as an option to get trees pruned. NYC Parks should also involve local businesses. Businesses could be pre-approved to do tree maintenance and trained on what is and isn’t allowed, so a citizen can call someone up to get tree work done same day. This can help citizens get work done faster and create a new revenue stream for local businesses. It’s worth noting we effectively did this when solving our Wasp’s nest problem, albeit without the training or permit 😅 

• Define Reimbursable Tree Work: Trees are public property, so if citizens are performing needed maintenance work that benefits the whole block, it’s reasonable they should be reimbursed for that. With a more robust tree approval process, NYC Parks could define what tree work is reimbursable (if it contributes to the safety of the block) and what is not reimbursable (if it is purely cosmetic tree work)

We want to hear what you think is the best policy to improve tree maintenance. Reply to this email with any thoughts that you have, and we’ll incorporate this feedback into our conversations with the City Council and NYC Parks. I’ll make sure to share any feedback in upcoming Better Block updates on the topic, as well as status of the legislation.

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

• 🏠️ Improving Vacant Buildings on Fulton, Jefferson and Macon: We met this week with the Department of Buildings who was able to give us more insight on the current state of 1105 Fulton and 26 Jefferson. While there seems to be positive momentum in permitting with 26 Jefferson, 1105 Fulton stills shows no sign of removing the scaffolding, and was recently fined for lack of lighting on the space

• 🚌 Improving the Bus Stop on Franklin and Fulton: The bus stop drug use continues to fester after a brief audit this past week. We plan to follow up next week to determine best next steps to improve the situation, including attending the initial Community Board 3 meeting in September

• 🗑️ Fulton Street Trash Clean Up: We followed up again with DSNY about enforcing illegal dumping and adding a collection route, and we haven’t heard back from them. We’re continuing to promote our sidewalk art installation on August 23rd in order to educate the community on how to keep Fulton clean. Make it out if you can!

That’s all for this week’s update. If you like what we’re doing here, share betterblockproject.com with other community members you know who are looking to drive change in Brooklyn.

See you next week,

David