Better protection needed for urban trees

Opinion

Poet Joyce Kilmer perhaps said it best in his poem Trees — and with brevity, too.

“I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.”

While you might have stopped and thought about the poetry of the trees that are a constant in the city of Winnipeg — big and small, sometimes healthy and other times failing, you probably haven’t thought about the value of a tree.

“Depending on the city, for each dollar spent on tree maintenance, about $1.88 to $12.70 was returned in various benefits,” Tree Canada points out. “These values are likely to be lower estimates, as they do not include the value of tourism, recreation, or impact on property values, human health, and social wellbeing. Urban trees provide services akin to other urban infrastructure by reducing runoff and erosion, improving air quality, saving energy, and sequestering carbon, which increases over time as trees grow.”

So it’s probably only sensible that the City of Winnipeg should not only actively protect and maintain its urban forest canopy, but require others to do it, too.

Right now, the city is examining the idea of a tree protection bylaw as part of a general bylaw review this year.

But in the meantime, council is also looking at requiring infill developers to pay a set fee — $1,000, the amount it costs the city to plant a tree on public land — into a Public Tree Fund when the developers can’t meet the number of trees required under the city’s current landscaping rules.

Several Canadian cities already require developers to pay a fee — often between $1,000 and $2,000 — for each tree they fail to plant. Developers have argued that the fee is actually a tax for having used lots to the maximum developable size permitted under zoning regulations.

But that muddies the water more than a little bit: after all, landscaping rules generally require the planting of a certain number of trees, and if the footprint of a building makes it impossible to plant those trees, then developers simply save the cost of the work they were supposed to do. All the fee would do is ensure that, if a tree can’t go on the lot of a particular infill development, it will go somewhere else instead.

And $1,000 is remarkably cheap.

Consider this: the City of Saskatoon actually calculates a value for individual trees and levies that fee if a tree is removed. And it can be much more than $1,000.

Trees are marked with a warning placard for prospective developers, which has a space to include the cash value of the tree, based on its size and age. Tree protection includes a buffer zone so that heavy equipment doesn’t compact soil around tree roots.

And, “in general: trees that are healthy, sound and over 15 centimetres DBH will not be removed.” (DBH is a tree trunk’s diameter at breast height, measured at 1.3 metres above ground level.)

Saskatoon’s urban forestry plan includes expanding the amount of the city covered by a tree canopy to 15 to 20 per cent — and the city is looking at expanding its tree regulations to private property.

Want to test the value of trees in Winnipeg? Pick a hot summer day in the city, and walk down a block where the elms have been cut down because of Dutch Elm disease, followed by a block where the trees still stand. You’ll know in an instant what trees can do.

Oh, and back to Kilmer for a moment.

“Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.”

Winnipeg city council can’t make a tree either — but it can make a fee. And there are plenty of reasons why it should.