🐝 The Wasp Nest is Down and 🌳 What This Means for City Trees

🌟 Author’s Note

Hello and welcome to the 5 new advocates of the Better Block Project! Our total group of advocates is now 59 individuals who all care about making a difference in NYC 💪 .

🐝 The Wasp Nest is Down

At 10:08am on Wednesday morning, the Williamsburg Wasp Nest has officially been taken down 🥳 . After two months and several attempts to engage with the city to take down the Wasp Nest in front of Le Doggie Cool, Remi and I decided to hire an exterminator and solve the problem ourselves. See the video below:

The exterminator was remarkably quick and professional and it felt great to see the nest finally come down. However, it’s important to review all the work Remi and the small business owner put in to try to get the city to solve the problem:

• Contacted 311 multiple times, who instructed them to call the police

• Reached out to their City Council office (after following up multiples times)

• City Council replies and notes they need a tree permit

• City Council follows up and communicates a certified arborist should be hired who should then submit the tree permit

• Arborist shared they can only do tree work, not extermination work

• Published a Pix11 news story on the Wasp nest, who also reaches out to Parks

• Parks finally replies and refuses to provide a contractor contact due to conflicts of interest 🤷

• City Council replies with another form, but for personal, not street pest removal

Nine separate attempts to engage with the city and multiple months of effort: zero wasp nest removed. A few calls to exterminators: the nest was removed in about an hour.

🌳 What This Means for City Trees

The lesson we’ve learned from removing the nest is simple: residents and businesses shouldn’t have to go through the city to repair a tree that is right on their front doorstep. The current policy resulted in multiple months of delay, many parties involved and a lot of unnecessary expense. Why is this the case?

Trees are governed under section 18-129 of the Administrative Code: Fines for unlawful cutting of trees on department property. Specifically, “It shall be unlawful…to cut, remove or in any way destroy or cause to be destroyed, any tree or other form of vegetation on public property.” Practically, as the Parks Department has written this, this applies to any tree pruning or pest management. As a result, neighbors can’t prune their tree without a 311 request and a tree permit. As I have heard stories from neighbors, this is problematic for a few reasons:

• Inspectors are slow or non-responsive, so in some cases, the trees are just never pruned. As we talked about it in a prior post, for this block the tree roots have caused issues with the sidewalk and it’s taken months for the city to intervene

• If the inspector who shows up disagrees with your assessment about pruning the tree, even though they don’t live there, they won’t do it (this has happened on the Claver block where a tree was blocking a doorway)

• The permitting process is very onerous, resulting in many residents just giving up and accepting the status quo

Due to this, some residents don’t want more trees on their block! I was in a recent block association meeting where a neighbor expressed concerns around having more trees on the block for fear they would inevitably not have the freedom to take care of them. NYC, through the Urban Forest Plan, has the goal to increase tree canopy coverage from 23% to 30% over the next 10 years in the city. This is an amazing goal, but it will be difficult to achieve if residents aren’t excited to have new trees planted in their neighborhood. We’re literally missing the forest for the trees.

So, how can we fix it? It should not require a tree work permit to prune a tree or remove a Wasp’s nest. NYC Parks can introduce a “light tree work” category that enables residents to make smaller changes to trees, such as:

• Pruning small branches less than 3-5 feet long

• Removing wasps or hornets nests

By updating this policy, residents and businesses could solve these smaller issues on their own, saving their time ⌛️ and saving money 💰️ for New York city. It’s totally reasonable for the city to restrict cutting down trees or major repairs, these are bigger jobs that are more complex and require more expertise. However, the policy today makes it so NYC Parks has to keep an eye on 666,134 street trees for any small repairs. It’s an impossible task. We’re going to engage with the Parks department and our city officials to get feedback on this new policy idea, but feel free to reply with any thoughts you have.

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

We made progress across every problem we’re working through this week, see our updates below:

• 🗑️ Cleaning up the Trash on Fulton Street: On Thursday, we passed out fliers on Fulton and Franklin for our upcoming July 9th event to advocate for a Cleaner Fulton Street. Thank you, Andrea, for the help! We’re up to 15 attendees now, RSVP if you haven’t already. The more people who attend, the more likely we are to see action from the city.

• 🏢 Improving Vacant Properties on Fulton, Jefferson and Macon: We officially scheduled time to review the Fulton and Jefferson properties with HPD the week of July 21st. We also learned a lot about the history of 73 and 75 Macon, and have a clear path to improving one of the properties which we’ll dive into in a coming update.

• 🏠️ Protecting Residents from Property Tax Reform: We’re still working to schedule time with Senator Gounardes’s office, who finally replied. We haven’t heard back from Assemblymember Williams or Assemblymember Braunstein’s offices.

Finally, we’re planning to help a neighbor clean up the bus stop of Franklin and Fulton, where unfortunately construction from DOT has created a new homeless encampment with open drug use. We’re in the early discovery phase with this problem and will share details as we learn more.

🤝 How you can help

1. If you think you can help out on any of the problems above, just reply to this update. This community is a large part of the power we have to make a difference.

2. As a reminder, share the July 9th Fulton Community Trash Event with anyone you know impacted by the issue, and make plans to attend! This is our next big issue we hope to tackle!

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