It could take years for the City of New Westminster to replace all the dying and dead trees on city streets and boulevards and in city parks.
But a newly purchased stump grinder is helping to speed up the process.
At its March 27 meeting, council considered a motion from Coun. Daniel Fontaine aimed at ensuring the timely removal and replacement of dead and/or dying trees on city property.
“It's an issue that over the past four months council has heard me speak to many times, just around the issue of dead and/or dying trees on our public streets, and how important it is for us, from a public realm perspective, that once these trees have died, for whatever reason, or are in the process of dying and have to be removed, that we identify them, we tag them and we remove them, and then we replant them as quickly as possible,” he said. “I think we need to set targets for that.”
If people remove trees on private land in New West, the city requires that they be replaced, Fontaine said.
“I think it will put us in a much better position to be asking private citizens to retain trees and to plant more trees if we're doing that on our own public property and our own sites,” he said.
Fontaine’s motion asked staff to report back on the resources required and the staffing implications of conducting an audit on the number of dead and/or dying trees on city sidewalks, boulevards and adjacent to arterial roads requiring replacement, as well as the estimated costs associated removing those trees and replanting them before April 2024. The motion also recommended that any tree on city-owned property must be cut down to a stump be removed and replanted without a 12-month period.
Coun. Nadine Nakagawa said she supported the spirit of the motion, but had concerns about some of the specific actions, such as the completion of a tree audit.
“My goal is to get as many trees planted in our community as possible, and to do it in a way that's equitable, that that prioritizes neighbourhoods that are deficient in tree canopy,” she said. “And we know where those are based on our tree-planting plan.”
Nakagawa said some of the trees that have been removed cannot be replanted in those locations, as they were not planted in ways that were sustainable in the first place.
“This, really, at the end of the day, is about resources again, and requires budget enhancement to prioritize his work,” she said. “And I would just remind all of us that at the end of the day, if we want more trees, we need to allocate budget for the purchase of trees and staffing to plant those trees and then maintain them so that they can be successful. So these are truly budget questions.”
Hundreds of trees cut down
Dean Gibson, the city’s director of parks and recreation, said city recently acquired is first-ever stump grinder, and now has the ability to do the final step of the tree-removal process, which is cutting the stumps to the ground and using the grinder to remove the root structures. He explained that stumps are left in the ground until that’s done because they’re visible and address potential tripping hazards on city boulevards.
“With the acquisition of that piece of equipment, just in the last three months we've been able to make some progress in dealing with a backlog of grinding for the stumps themselves, where historically, that practice would have been done on an annual basis through a contracted service,” he said.
Gibson said the city will have a bit more flexibility in stump-removal now that it has its own equipment.
“But the inventory of our backlog is not inconsequential, and would take a number of years for us to be able to catch up to a state of where things are at today,” he said.
Gibson said the city has a relatively small crew that’s able to do this work.
“The priority has been, for the last couple of years and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, in placing new trees in the ground,” he said. “And then, as resources are available, we will be continuing with the removal of the stumps as they exist in various areas around the city.”
According to Gibson, the city has removed upwards of 800 trees in parks and open spaces since about 2011. He said staff are less certain about the number of stumps from those trees that remain in the ground.
“Staff's estimate would suggest that it is somewhere in the order of about 50 per cent of the trees that are have been removed still have stumps in the ground,” he said.
Coun. Tasha Henderson suggested some changes be made to the motion, so it could be supported by council. That included removing the request to have staff conduct an audit of the dead and/or dying trees on city lands and removing the reference to requiring trees to be replaced within 12 months.
“I'm open to asking staff what the cost would be to have them replanted by 2024 because I think that becomes a budget question, and we can decide to prioritize this or not when we have a sense of that,” she said.
Coun. Ruby Campbell said she’d prefer to leave the timelines a little bit more open, as the city doesn’t know what work would be involved in removing all of those trees by next April or the staffing resources needed to get that work done.
After a bit of give and take on the wording, council unanimously approved a motion to have staff report back on the estimated costs associated with removing all of the dead and/or dying trees on city-owned land and replanting them before April 2024. It also states that, where feasible, the city will remove and replant trees that are dead and/or dying and will do this work in a way that’s consistent with the priorities set out in the city's tree planting master plan.
“The tree surviving is really what matters,” Nakagawa said. “We can plant 10,000 trees, and if they all die it's a really big waste of money and energy.”
