They came to speak for the trees.

In a month or so, the seven stately ficus trees bordering Washington Square Park on Columbus Avenue are likely to meet their fate at the business end of a wood chipper. But on Monday night, in what was probably the final appeal to save them, eight San Franciscans rose in their defense.

Like much of San Francisco’s ficus population, the Columbus Avenue trees have been condemned by the Public Works Department as too risky to leave standing.

Despite their impressive canopies, ficus are susceptible to limb failure, and their particularly belligerent roots warp and buckle sidewalks. It’s been illegal to plant the spindly trees in San Francisco since the 1990s, and in 2014, Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru issued an order that made it easier to remove the trees after a rash of limb failures.

And while speakers came to address the case of just seven sidewalk trees, their objections reflected wider concerns about the city’s tree-maintenance practices and what many see as its anemic attempts to grow San Francisco’s urban canopy.

Each month the public gets a chance to protest tree removals before Nuru approves them. At Monday’s hearing, Public Works Urban Forestry Superintendent Carla Short flipped through a slideshow of the trees, explaining why the department decided to take them down. Some have weak limbs; some have been struck by vehicles repeatedly; some are interfering with Muni wires.

And while Public Works plans to replace the ficus with either Brisbane boxes or gingko trees, Short’s presentation did little to assuage those opposed to their removal, some of whom said Washington Square would look “like a bombed-out shell” if they were cut down.

“The ficus trees along Columbus were planted to beautify S.F. and to benefit the residents and visitors to North Beach. Please don’t destroy this legacy,” said Patsy Ferguson, who lives on Russian Hill and gives walking tours of the area — tours that begin beneath the trees she wants saved. To reinforce her point, resident Lance Carnes handed over an unofficial petition signed by 500 people urging preservation of the trees.

On a broader level, the Columbus Avenue ficus reflect dissatisfaction with how Public Works and other agencies are handling San Francisco’s urban forest. At 13.7 percent of its area, San Francisco has one of the smallest tree canopies of any major U.S. city, according to Public Works’ Urban Forest Plan. Los Angeles, by comparison, has 21 percent canopy coverage; New York has 24 percent.

Progress at enlarging that canopy has been glacially slow.

A 2014 plan set a goal of 50,000 new trees in San Francisco by 2034 — or about 2,500 trees annually. Last fiscal year, the city came up 2,499 trees short, as the number of trees planted (3,157) exceeded the number of trees removed (3,156) by a single tree, according to the annual urban forest report from the Department of the Environment.

“Trees are not just pretty green things. They’re municipal infrastructure,” Joshua Klipp, an attorney and frequent critic of the city’s tree management, said at the hearing. “We wouldn’t treat our sewer system, our power grid, not even our free WiFi this way. We’re at a crisis juncture right now.”

City officials and tree advocates agree that a chronic lack of funding for planting and watering trees is a big reason for the slow growth of the urban canopy. Voters passed Proposition E in 2016, which gave Public Works $19 million a year to maintain the city’s street trees.

That money is used primarily for trimming and removal, and none of it goes toward replanting and watering, the largest costs of growing the canopy. Short said it usually takes three years of watering before a newly planted tree can thrive on its own.

Public Works’ tree-planting budget this year is $2.5 million, and the sources of that money can be volatile.

“There is not a sustainable funding source, such as what the Proposition E ballot measure provided for tree maintenance,” said Rachel Gordon, a spokeswoman for Public Works. Revenue sources for planting include developer fees, fines for damaging or removing street trees, transportation sales taxes, general fund allocations, and the occasional discretionary expenditure by district supervisors.

“We’re finding it’s really hard to find the money in this city to plant trees,” said Dan Flanagan, executive director of Friends of the Urban Forest. “Many cities in the U.S., primarily on the East Coast, were carved out of forests. Our city was carved basically out of sand dunes. There’s no tree DNA in this city.”

Flanagan said he was working with the mayor’s office and the Board of Supervisors to include more money for tree planting and maintenance in next year’s budget.

Short said that tree planting would begin to accelerate once Public Works’ arborists and tree trimmers catch up with years of deferred maintenance. Prior to the passage of Prop. E, property owners were responsible for caring for most of the city’s street trees — a confusing and widely unpopular practice that resulted in substantial neglect that the department is starting to make up for.

Still, Short knows the slow pace of replanting has eroded the public’s faith in the city’s ability to grow the urban forest. That’s why she has pledged to have the Columbus Avenue trees replaced within three months of their removal.

“We’re starting with a deficit of trust,” she said. “But (the Columbus Avenue project) is an opportunity for us to build that trust with the community.”

Dominic Fracassa is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dfracassa@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @dominicfracassa