Octavia. It was not the biggest one out there. It split in half. If you think about it buses get in accidents all the time and people get hurt but for the common good of the city, we have buses. So i think trees are very similar to that. I mean i unfortunately, i live on the side of town and they planted palm trees all the way down the street. They look horrible. I mean, they look miserable. And they dont do anything as far as what they are taking out as far as carbon monoxide. Its kind of a weed. So it saddens me to see that we are taking this many trees out like wholesale. And what is the survival rate for a new tree . Theres typically a two to four percent mortality of replacement trees. Only four percent . You are saying 98 percent survive. Of trees that are planted yes. When proposition e was suggested, we absolutely wanted to see i did want to answer that. Because maintenance was a challenge. And the mayor initiated the planning of a lot of trees. Tree advocates say whoa, how about we get funding for maintaining the existing trees. We have that now. So actually the trees that we are planting we can guarantee longterm funding for. Okay. We are working hard on getting that funding. We have already made progress this year, the mayor had a press release about funding for urban forestry for Tree Planting. So its starting to happen. Were the fifth largest economy in the world. And we fund free needles but we cant get trees in our ground. I agree. And thats not your fault. Im not blaming you at all. So you are taking down 28 trees. And how many are you replacing . I know you put something on the overhead but i didnt see that. Correct. So there are its 27 trees now because one failed. So removal of 27 trees replacing with 27. Four of the trees onsite cant be replanted in the location where they are. We will find a close location to replant. So its a one for one replacement with 24inch box sized trees. Okay. My concern the last case directly prior to this is a good example. Theres a picture of an ally that overpruned, they were supposed to replace all those trees. There wasnt one tree out of the eight trees that were supposed to be there on that ally. Ill look at that. Because they removed two trees in front so they can broaden their entrance to create their big expanse of their school and they were supposed to take care of the trees in the back and they didnt. There was ten trees there and now theres no trees there. Protection is critical. Some of our advocates here are aware of that. And together we are trying to address that. Okay. That was it. Thank you. I would like you to rest your feet for a minute. I would like to take advantage of her being here tonight. Sure. Thank you. Hey carla. Commissioners, nice to see you all. Carla, San Francisco public works. Hi. I have a whole bunch of questions. And i would like to step away from this particular case, because sometimes we tend to be a little narrow in our view. And we are not looking at the macro. We are alluding to the macro but not getting to the macro. Quite frankly, i see very little problem with this project. Its been wellexplained. I know that ficus trees can be dangerous. Its not about that. I really wanted you to be here tonight to look at a more macro view and im not sure im going to support this initiative Going Forward when we get done. So first of all, i want to let you know, that i really appreciate your departments very hard work. Second of all, i would like to let you know that i understand that probably five decades of neglect, at least were present in the management of the tree canopy in San Francisco, because for a variety of reasons it deteriorated and people didnt take care of it. Thirdly, i want to acknowledge that funding is probably not enough for you to do your job therefore you dont have the resources satisfactory to complete your job in the way that the citizens would like to see it complete. So there are a lot of factors. And finally, as a result of all that, your department is way behind. You have a lot of holes in the ground where there needs to be trees. Theres a lot of ficus trees and others which are poorly maintained and require pruning at the very least. And furthermore you have a lot of projects that we have seen presented in front of us. So you are way behind, all right . And i appreciate that. Thats not and thats not a fault of yours. That starts with the 50 years of neglect. All right. So but all that being said, why are you starting yet another project . We have seen and im going to get to my questions. But thats the core question. Why are you starting another project when theres no funding . Why are you starting another project when the north beach there are four dozen empty tree basins, and supervisor peskin in legislation i think a year and a half ago provided funding for your department to fill those tree basins . Because hes wanted to support you and wanted to support, of course, north beach, so he would get elected again. And then we look at the budget. It doesnt take one year to have it survive. Its three years at a bare minimum. So theres no budget to water. So why is not the watering infrastructure being worked on in advance of planting a tree thats going to die because it cant get water for three years to let it survive . This makes no sense to me. Thats another question. We have seen in front of us Washington Square where there was a i dont know where that stands. Its supposed to come back to us. It might not. It might get settled if we are lucky. But we saw a plan presented and we challenged mr. Buck no fault of his. Hes made us all tree huggers. That was carla for me. We are all about him, but in Washington Square, there was a plan to remove trees and then put them back. Yet we all sat here and heard there really wasnt a plan to put them back because we didnt see he couldnt explain to us how he was going to set them in on the sidewalk. So it was lets cut the trees down, this is how it sounded to us. Lets cut the trees down but we dont know where we are going to put them back. So no planning. We saw a civic centre library. Thats still under discussion. Its been back to us twice. Once there was absolutely no plan and dialogue between your department and the library and the community. Now theres been six months later eight months later, more dialogue between the community the library and your department. Yet it wasnt quite ready yet so we sent it back again. Thats another project that needs to be thats completely in upheaval. I think its 16th street where muni has a big plan and its going to chop off a bunch of trees. And yeah, theres a plan. But its a big project. And how is that going to get done in a timely fashion . And this leads back to hayes valley. You all have huge problems catching up with 50 years of bad maintenance. Youll have huge problems filling those tree basins and doing those projects. Why are you even thinking when you can mitigate the problem not solve the problem, cure the problem through pruning, even though its not why are you even thinking at this time of starting yet another project in hayes valley which places that community at significant risk because you may not get it done in a timely fashion even though you committed to start it in two months and get it done 90 days later. This is what i wanted to have you come here today to explain to us to put our minds at ease because we are sitting here going, okay sounds good, its legal lets go. But we scratch our heads and we say how the hell is this Department Going to get it done . Not because of competency. Just because who the hell could do it. So could you address that, please . A lot of questions but ultimately, why are you starting this project and why are we considering it tonight for immediate passage to move forward . Sure. Thank you for those points and questions. I will do my quest to try to address them. Thank you for recognizing the challenges that we did face. I think its important to recognize that you are right we are starting behind the 8 ball, so to speak. There were years of deferred maintenance both on the part of the city and on the part of property owners. And we are now playing catchup, as you say. We were fortunate after years of effort to pass a Ballot Initiative that gives us dedicated funding for tree maintenance. It sounds like a lot of money. But when you spread it out over 125,000 trees, it means we have to be as efficient as possible with that money. So what that means is we are going in area by area. Weve broken the city into what are we are using a mapping unit called key maps. We have to go in and do everything that we can. Thats the only way to efficiently get the work done. We need to try to address the needs of that area. So what we are doing is we are using some of the information from the census but then our inspectors go in ahead of the contractor or city crews to reassess those trees and identify what work needs to happen. Weve got to do it systematically were well always be behind the 8 ball. Well never catch up. Well be playing catch up forever. And the passage of that Ballot Initiative will not succeed. So we are not starting another project. We are working our way through the city. Thats what we are doing. We are working our way through the city. These trees were identified as part of that key map that we were moving into. And we have to look at everything in that key map when we go in. I do want to correct a few theres been a lot of attention on the ficus trees. Ficus trees are not a huge proportion of our existing tree population. They are about seven percent of our existing tree population. And only seven percent of the ficus trees that weve worked on have been removed. So of the seven percent weve only worked on a fraction of them. But of the fraction that weve worked on only seven percent have been removed. This is not wholesale removal of trees. It sure feels dramatic when they happen to all be planted near each other in a neighborhood. I certainly appreciate that. But i think we need to keep in mind the scale that we are talking about. I want to correct a few other statements that have been made. We never plant a tree without the resources to water it. We understand better than anyone that you cant put a tree in the ground and not water it. I think the misunderstanding was that weve tried to clarify the dedicated funding for maintenance does not allow us to plant or water new trees. That dedicated funding has to be used for tree maintenance. So weve stated that publicly a number of times. I think people have misunderstood that to mean we can plant trees and not water them. We build the cost of watering into every tree we plant which is why its so expensive to plant a tree in San Francisco because we have to water for three years and we have to water 12 months out of three years when we are in a drought. Nine or ten months we are not in a drought. So its expensive but we build the cost into that planting. What i think we should have communicated was with regards to projects like hayes valley like you mentioned columbus, we are focusing those limited resources we did have on replanting where there are a lot of removals in one place. So if we have a lot of trees that are coming out as are proposed on hayes and octavia we want to make sure those trees do get replanted right away. Because thats where the biggest impact is. What that means is we may have some existing empty basins somewhere else that dont get replanted right away because again, we have limited resources. The good news as mr. Buck said earlier this year we actually have the greatest budget for Tree Planting weve had in 15 years that ive been on the job. And thats in large part because this deferred maintenance and the catchup weve been playing has resulted in more removals than we have done in a year. What is that actually . Its two percent of all our trees. Weve only removed two percent per year for the last two years. So again we are not wholesale removing urban forests. We are all here, we are all wearing our stickers too because we love trees. Thats why we are in this business. We have challenges. And we have to make tough decisions. It is not easy. I hate removing a tree that looks healthy. But we have to be taking Public Safety seriously. We have had two injuries on our watch both caused by ficus trees, and both that we dont want to lose sleep over another injury again. The idea is we protect Public Safety and we maintain trees. We preserve as many trees as we can. And we replace trees. And then we grow the urban forest. So our urban forest, everyone is fighting the canopy numbers. That came from our urban forest plan. They know that because we are out there advocating for better urban forest. Thats how we got our money for maintenance and thats how we are going to get our money for planting. And we are going to be behind the 8 ball on planting just as we started behind on maintenance but we are committed to making that happen. So this year we are able to commit and i want to give an example of everett middle school. This was a case where we said, okay a lot of trees coming out around the school. We are going to make a commitment, we are going to get the replacement trees done quickly. We put out our schedule, we had our crews lined up and we had the trees within three months. In fact it was faster than that. Why cant we do it the next day . Because we have to grind the stump. In many cases we have to repair the sidewalk. We have to shift basins. Its not as simple as pulling out a potted plant and putting in a plant. Theres a lot of factors that go into this. We are trying to rebuild the public trust. We know we dont have it. We hear that every day. But we are trying to rebuild it. Weve got to be realistic. I cant tell you im going to have them planted a week after they cut down. Talk about losing trust. Three months we think thats realistic. Its ambitious. Its going to be a challenge for us to coordinate the different pieces. But we are committed to trying to rebuild that trust and also rebuild the canopy for these communities. Unfortunately no tree will last forever and certainly in urban settings, four percent mortality is considered good, reasonable mortality level. Weve only removed two percent over the last two years. So i think we are not starting the project. We are trying to work our way systematically through the city. In terms of addressing Public Safety concerns and i hope you took the time to look through the brief a large ficus failure is terrifying. We have lost many, many im sorry, damage to property, we have paid for more vehicles. And im okay with that. If we have to pay for a vehicle thats great. I just dont want to be paying for peoples injuries. And so its real. We have to be systematic but we have to address the highest liability first. And thats why it feels like so much is happening right now. Because we are addressing a lot of deferred maintenance removals now. Its not accelerated. Its playing catchup. So we do plan to put them back. We are focusing the resources that we have on replacement trees. We do have some dedicated funding this year for new trees. But the board of supervisors said we know you need to replace trees but we want to make sure you are working on the goals to replace the urban forest. So some of our money is restricted. We have three different types of money. Some can be used for replacement or new some must be used for replacement and some must be used for new. But we are focusing on efforts on replacing, particularly when there are lots of trees coming out. We are focusing those replacements first. We will try to get to the other replacements as quickly as we can. And so we do have a plan to put them back. And then lastly i think you talked about more dialogue. We have tried to be very proactive with hayes valley. We approached them before we even completed our assessment of the trees. We thought this grid is coming up. We know those trees. We shop in hayes valley. We like that neighborhood. We also know some of those trees have structural problems so we reached out and said when can we talk to you about this we want to start talking. We had two different neighborhood walks. As chris said we stopped and spent almost 30 minutes at the very first tree. We are like we are never going to get through all the trees if we dont keep moving. So we kept moving. We are hearing you in terms of doing that outreach. We have done it with every project now where theres or every area where weve gone in and theres a large number of trees proposed for removal. We did a lot of outreach on 24th street and columbus avenue and a lot of outreach here in hayes valley. And how do we i think it was 16th street. What was the last one . 16th street was the muni thing . And i recall because i participated in that dialogue that we came to an agreement as part of our approval of that initiative that you would have the trees done, that project done started by in x number of days or months and finished in x numbers of days or months. I cant remember the details. The focus of the question is its nice that we sit here and we say okay do this in this period of time and mr. Buck accommodatingly says yes. And we have no idea that it ever gets done until we hear from the public that the project was started and never finished or you hear the rhetoric im sure on a daily basis. So if we tonight move forward with this and you establish in your own brief some parameters around that, and we agree to those parameters, how does the public, how do we, who offer that approval, and the public, hold you accountable if instead of three months from now when its supposed to be done its not or six months from now it isnt even done or nine months from now it isnt even done which unfortunately as part of your track record, not globally but unfortunately there have been several projects which kind of lag. So how does the public or ourselves hold you accountable or how can we have the trust that its actually going to get done when we move it forward . Yeah. And i think the only thing that i can say in response to that is we have to build that trust. So we have to be successful. And we recognize that. It is no fun for me or for chris buck no fun for me to be here. I like seeing you all but i dont have to come to these hearings anymore and i changed my plans tonight to accommodate this. We appreciate that. We dont want to be called to task for failing to do things. Its way more fun for us in our work to be able to say you can trust us because look, we are starting to prove that we are capable of doing this. So we are more motivated probably than anyone to hold ourselves accountable. It will make our jobs easier in the future if we can deliver on these things. It will help ensure we are not getting bombarded with nasty emails that we get constantly. We have every interest in being accountable because it will only make people trust us more, and then it will make our jobs easier. I cant i dont know of a way to say you know, well have this accountability watch us. We dont ha