Stakeholders heat up over Tree Project agenda
A room of area residents representing various city bureaus, environmental conservation efforts, development efforts, neighborhood associations and professional arborists met last week to further discuss Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability’s (BPS) Citywide Tree Project (CTP).
Although many in the group seem unable to recollect the beginning of their ‘stakeholder sessions,’ most easily admit the process has taken over a year.
With hundreds of pages written and all of the content available online, project manager Roberta Jortner said the project is past the development stage, and getting through the vetting process, entering the legislative arena.
The goal of the CTP is to distribute the equity of the urban forest to the city, said Jortner.
“Trees in the city are really a multi-billion dollar asset,” she said.
As the group shuffled through the 54 slides, they discussed and argued several specific elements for the entire project, which now has an estimated price tag between $800,000 and $2 million.
Funding for the CTP is a large issue, as many members of the group speculated that the city agencies involved (Portland Parks & Recreation, Bureau of Environmental Services) do not agree on where the money should come from, or even if funding is feasible.
Some hot points deliberated:
- fixing the complex regulation of trees in the city, ideally housing all tree code for multiple bureaus within one document
- how ‘priority’ trees can be removed on development sites, and payment plans for remittance
- assessing tree density goals for development procedures and tree replacement protocol
- programmatic permits
- peer review for Portland Urban Forestry reports
The next opportunity for public discourse on these topics and many others is tomorrow, 7-9 p.m., at the Multnomah Arts Center. The next open house after that is March 16, 6:30-8:30 p.m., at the Floyd Light Middle School.
–Toshio Suzuki