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The Portland City Council made a major change last week to the team of inspectors that enforces the city’s Tree Code, which regulates all street trees and some trees on private land across the city.
The council voted to move the entire tree regulation team—which currently falls under the Urban Forestry division, a program nested within the parks bureau—to Portland Permitting & Development. PP&D is the city’s centralized permitting office that brought code enforcement functions previously housed under eight different bureaus under one roof.
The proposal was the brainchild of Councilor Eric Zimmerman, who for weeks has called into question Urban Forestry and how it polices and fines Portlanders seeking to trim or remove trees on or near their property. (Willamette Week wrote about the division in a March 5 cover story.) Zimmerman also been critical of parks bureau leaders, accusing them of stonewalling his requests for budget and program information as the council hashes out a budget. Parks leaders have denied those accusations.
“In a place where I think we’ve got a city program that’s being administered in an either unfair manner or is not treating Portlanders well, we do have a duty to act,” Zimmerman told his colleagues on the dais as they discussed the proposal.
The tree regulators—who also process and vet permits for tree removals, replantings and prunings—will move to PP&D by Oct. 1. That means they will no longer be the under the oversight of city forester Jenn Cairo, whose management has come under scrutiny.
Urban Forestry took another hit as well. The council also voted to transfer $2.1 million of Parks Levy funds from the Tree Code regulation division (the team that’s moving to the centralized permitting office) to backfill maintenance cuts to outdoor parks. That means the council has backfilled most, if not all, of the planned parks maintenance cuts through various amendments to Mayor Keith Wilson’s budget in the past month.
Just earlier this year, Urban Forestry drastically reduced many of its tree-related permit fees and eliminated other fees entirely.
Two councilors, Candace Avalos and Tiffany Koyama Lane, said they did not have the time nor access to adequate information to support Zimmerman’s amendments.
“I still question whether or not this is the best way to fix [the issues at Urban Forestry] from the council,” Koyama Lane said. “I haven’t had much time to understand the systems and structures at play.”
Urban Forestry will still oversee tree-planting efforts across the city (including a massive tree-planting spree over the next five years thanks to an infusion of money from the city’s climate tax), tree outreach and education, and tree maintenance. Over the coming years, Urban Forestry is also set to take over maintenance of all of the city’s street trees, taking the financial burden of care off of adjacent property owners.
But it no longer has a regulatory authority after Oct. 1. The power to police the city’s tree canopy moves to the permitting office.
The City Council is set to take a final vote on the city budget Wednesday, June 18.