The primary issue?    The City's Urban Forest Management Plan (UFMP), passed by the city Council in 2019, has never been fully funded.

 

And there are two other issues:

1. Home owners are responsible for planting and maintaining all trees in our parking strips (called Public Right-of-Ways, or ROWs).

   • They represent 26% of the available space for trees in Tacoma, and only 9.2% of our trees are currently planted in ROWs.

   • Most cities take responsibility, and work with communities to maintain and improve street trees, and most have laws that require developers to pay for improvements when they build along streets.  This includes the sidewalks that need attention when tree roots lift them up to interfere with safe walking.

   • Street trees create the environment that bring people into neighborhoods and to frequented businesses nearby. 

2. Trees can hold stormwater in place, preventing it from polluting our waterways.

   • During the last hundred years since out predecessors clearcut our town to initiate the timber industry, we have essentially ignored this issue and continued to replace permeable ground with impervious surfaces that exacerbate the problem.

   • The City’s solution was to create a Stormwater Management Plan (more than 50 pages in length) that not once mentions the word “tree."  The solution was to place drains in our impervious surfaces to draw stormwater into pipes.  Then it would take the water to a treatment plant that would purify the water before it would then enter the sound.

   • Meanwhile, many cities (ex: Portland, Oregon) require developers to retain stormwater on the property they are developing.  

   • Every budget cycle, the City has raised the fees we pay monthly on our utility bills for “stormwater service."  This funds their plan to spend billions of dollars creating a gray infrastructure that will depreciate over time, when they could spend a few million to strategically place trees instead.  If we shifted the balance of how that money is spent from 99% gray-1% green to 86% gray-14% Green, we could fund the complete reforestation of Tacoma, and watch it appreciate.

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Reforest Tacoma is determined to help solve these issues!