🌳 How Long Does it Take to Prune Your Street Tree? Maybe 25 Years

🌟 Author’s Note

Happy Sunday to the 125 members of the Better Block Project 👋 In early October, we submitted a Freedom of Information request to NYC Parks to better understand how tree pruning actually worked. This week, we finally heard back! Here is the TLDR:

• Staffing of the NYC Parks tree pruning team is 20% lower than it was 5 years ago, limiting capacity to prune all street trees

• With this smaller team, Parks trims about ~2,300 trees per month, suggesting it will take 25 years to prune all 675,000 street trees in New York

• It takes Parks an average of 23 days to issue a tree pruning permit, faster than we initially thought

• NYC Parks didn’t respond to our request for data on injuries or lawsuits related to lack of tree maintenance, referring us to the NYC Comptroller and New York’s Law Office

🌳 How Long Does it Take to Prune Your Street Tree? Maybe 25 Years

Street tree pruning, or lack thereof, is a hot button issue on many neighborhood blocks in Brooklyn. Street trees block street lights causing safety issues, and dead limbs cause property damage and sometimes personal injury.

We first learned about this issue when we worked to remove a Wasp Nest in Williamsburg, and found it almost impossible to have NYC Parks remove the nest in a timely manner. Later, as we dug deeper, we learned about fraudulent tree maintenance vendors and how staffing challenges were driving NYC Parks inability to trim all of the 675,000+ street trees.

As a result, in October, we submitted a Freedom of Information Request to NYC Parks to learn more about how street tree pruning actually worked in the NYC Parks Department. Our asks included:

• Understanding the frequency of tree pruning

• Details on response times to tree pruning permits

• Budget information on tree pruning

• Details on litigation claims related to any failure of tree pruning or maintenance

After 5 months, NYC Parks got back to us with their response and the data reinforces what we’ve already learned about the state of street tree pruning in NYC.

Tree Pruning Staffing Below FY22 Levels

The block pruning budget for street tree pruning is ~$8.8M dollars per year. This is the same level the budget has been since FY22, it hasn’t grown in the past 5 years. In our initial outreach to Parks, they stated that staffing was a core challenge in street tree pruning, and in the FOIL request, you can see the numbers as to why.

In FY22, NYC Parks had 100 individuals pruning trees as a part of their climber pruning teams. Today, that number is 81 pruners, or roughly 20% less. Despite NYC Parks having the same budget, they haven’t been able to rebuild the staffing they once had, putting pressure on their ability to fulfill their mandate to keep all street trees pruned.

Tree Pruning Pace Suggests Trees are Pruned Once Every 25 Years

NYC Parks referred us to this public data set on tree pruning schedules which is accessible to anyone. It summarizes completed pruning work in the last 6 months and scheduled work. Here are the key findings:

• NYC prunes an average of ~2,300 trees per month

• In the last 6 months, no trees have been pruned in Brooklyn. It seems like the pruning operates on a borough by borough schedule, and all of the trees that have been pruned are in Queens, Staten Island and Manhattan

• If you combine the staffing data with the pruning records, you get to ~1.3 trees pruned per business day for each pruner

If you extrapolate out the ~2,300 trees per month figure, it would take NYC Parks ~25 years to get through all 675,000 street trees at their current rate of pruning. This is significantly longer than their state goal of pruning trees on blocks every 7 years. It’s not surprising, as when we talk to long term residents, many of them never recall the city coming by and pruning the trees in front of their homes.

Positive News on Tree Pruning Permits

The data from Parks on tree pruning permits is better than expected. Since 2022, Parks has received 263 permits to prune trees in New York (this number does feel low, but it’s the data set they gave us).

From that data, you can see they approve 74% of the permits to prune trees, and issue the permit in an average of 23 days. Ideally, this could be done faster but in a city that is known for permits taking months, 23 days actually feels fast!

Finally, NYC Parks didn’t respond to our request on injury data or civil lawsuits related to street trees, referring us to the NYC Comptroller and New York Law department 🤷 It’s unfortunate they don’t have the data on this, but we’re going to follow up with both departments to see what we can find.

Where NYC Parks Should go From Here

It’s clear NYC Parks is not living up to their mandate to prune all street trees, and the current staffing levels don’t suggest that will change anytime soon. With the current NYC budget shortfalls, it’s unlikely Parks will get more money to prune trees, nor should they.

NYC Parks should take a hard look at how they staff, manage the teams and the technology they use to increase the number of trees they can realistically prune each year. If NYC Parks can’t meet the demands on their own, they should consider policy to allow the public to trim the trees themselves. It’s untenable for NYC to forbid residents from trimming their own trees in front of their homes, while clearly demonstrating they can’t live up to the responsibility themselves.

Attached is the full response from NYC Parks if you’d like to review the data yourself! That’s all for this week’s update! As usual, if you like what we’re doing at the Better Block Project, forward this to someone you know that is looking to get more engaged in the neighborhood.

See you next week,

David