Neighborhoods in San Diego, especially those in low-income and urban areas, would get significantly more trees under a five-year “urban forestry” plan the City Council unanimously approved on Tuesday.

The proposal aims to help the city meet the goals of its ambitious climate action plan, which calls for increasing the percentage of San Diego covered by trees from 13 percent to 35 percent over the next two decades.

Supporters said the 32-page plan would also boost property values, improve air quality, enhance wildlife habitat and shrink energy costs by reducing the need for air conditioning.

Increasing a city’s tree canopy has also been shown to reduce storm water runoff, lower crime rates, boost public health and strengthen communities, city officials said.


“Now more than ever, cities and nature need each other,” said Ann Fege, chairwoman of the city’s Community Forest Advisory Board, who called the plan a big leap forward. “Nature and trees will make our cities much more livable.”

The plan includes 65 separate actions and initiatives aimed at giving San Diego a resilient, world-class urban forest.

The actions include creating a tree inventory this year to determine strengths and weaknesses in the city’s canopy, how to decide where to plant which types of trees and how to re-shape city policies for preserving and maintaining the roughly 1 million trees already in place.

Councilman Scott Sherman praised the plan, which includes three phases that run through the end of 2021.


“We’re actually going to have a plan,” he said. “We know what we’re going to put in the ground, we know how it works and we’re going to be thinking down the road. In the long run this will save us money, because we don’t have to go repair streets and dig up roots and dig up trees that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

Mike Palat, chairman of the San Diego Regional Urban Forest Council, said the plan makes San Diego the leading agency in the region regarding tree care and strategy.

Hurdles the city must overcome include neglect of trees and a dearth of planting during the Great Recession, a relative shortage of trees in low-income areas and ill-advised planting of trees in areas where they have buckled sidewalks or dropped fruit and leaves on cars and other private property.

In addition, the city has six separate departments that oversee tree planting and care, a problem the plan seeks to solve by streamlining and coordinating city efforts.


A key boost for the plan came in 2015 when the city secured a grant that used high-resolution light detection to determine San Diego’s urban tree canopy is 13 percent.

Previous efforts to determine the canopy used aerial imagery and found it was 7 percent in 2003 and 4.2 percent in 2010.

The percentage is key to the city’s climate action plan, which commits to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2035. One way the plan would accomplish that is by boosting the tree canopy to 15 percent by 2020 and 35 percent by 2035.

Last month, the city announced plans to plant 500 street trees in urban neighborhoods using a $750,000 grant from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention.


The trees will be planted along Market Street, Imperial Avenue, Ocean View Boulevard, 25th Street and 47th Street. They are projected to collectively capture roughly seven million pounds of carbon during their lifespans.

The five-year plan fund was funded by a $75,000 grant from the same state agency.

Some residents have expressed frustration over city policies that prohibit replacing damaged trees unless nearby property owners sign agreements to water them.

They contend it would be cheaper to preserve and replace the trees the city already has in place than to plant thousands of new trees.


But city officials note they don’t have equipment or funding to water many street trees.

City policy says a tree should only be removed if it is dead, hazardous, causing damage to public improvements, the owner of the fronting property requests the removal or the tree is not part of a uniform tree planting.

But the five-year plans notes that property owners face few consequences if they use poor pruning practices or illegally remove a tree.

The next key step for San Diego is creating an updated tree inventory to obtain a definitive understanding of the existing urban forest, which will help the city create a strategy and garner crucial public support.


The most recent tree inventory was completed in 2002. It included all trees in the public right-of-way, but not those in maintenance assessment districts.

While San Diego’s streets are lined with approximately 200,000 trees and 48,000 palms, previous studies estimated that they could accommodate more than four times that amount, the plan says.

Planting opportunities exist along under-planted arterial roads, in older neighborhoods where many trees have died, in new neighborhoods that lack trees, around schools and near freeway interchanges.

The city could also plant more trees in parks, open space areas and canyons.


david.garrick@sduniontribune.com (619) 269-8906 Twitter:@UTDavidGarrick