Have gotten from the Police Department on the demographics of crime victims and hatemotivated crime really did emphasize, or reinforce the concerns in the Chinese Community that they were increasingly victims of certain types of crime in the city, and also assaults. I think the most striking statistic from the initial data that we got from the Police Department was how African Americans are overwhelmingly, disproportionately victims of violent crimes, homicide, Sexual Assault and assault. Thank you for your work on this, especially supervisor walton and i look forward to supporting this effort moving forward. Thank you. Supervisor walton, would you like to make a motion to forward this to the full board with positive recommendation . Definitely, and add language and amendments specific to d. V. At the full board. Great. Take that without objection. Good. We have been joined by supervisor mar, here for the fourth item. Agenda item number 4, oh, excuse me hearing to examine the planting, removal and maintenance of trees on public sites in San Francisco. Great. Supervisor mar. Your hearing. Thank you for allowing us to hold this hearing today and cosponsoring it as well. And we are here to talk about trees in San Francisco. How many we have, how we are taking care of them, and when and why we are removing them, and more importantly, how many we are planting. At 13. 7 , San Franciscos urban canopy is the smallest of any major city in the United States. We set Ambitious Goals to expand the canopy yet last year we removed twice as many trees as planted, reducing the street tree canopy by nearly 2,500 ministries. With the recent addition of the street tree s. F. Program, dramatic changes in how we manage the street trees, and nine years remaining to make dramatic reductions in Greenhouse Gas emissions we have no time to spare. And i want to be clear at the outset of this hearing, when we talk about trees, we are not just talking about decorations or accessories or amenities, nice to have, which they are. We are talking about infrastructure, Green Infrastructure. To cap tower and sequester carbon, a tree. Earlier this year declared a state of emergency on the climate crisis, thank you supervisor mandelman, and urban canopy is a glaring blind spot to reduce Greenhouse Gasses and combat Climate Change. Combat Climate Change. Id like to welcome our first presenters, peter bradstou and jen from the department of environment. Sorry about that. Im from environment and jen jackson had to go. She had another engagement given the break for the alarm. And so thanks for calling this hearing. This is obviously a really important topic. Just briefly, who i am about the department of environment. Im a coordinator at the department providing Staff Support to the urban council and our department, as you know, provides a role of convener for many of the city departments and, of course, youll hear about the ontheground work later. The one place in the code where theres an actual definition of the term urban forest, trees on streets and public rights of way and the jurisdiction of the department of public works. And so, this is important because, actually, this part of the urban forest was subject of phase one of the urban forest master plan, which was pas passa few years ago. But thinking more broadly, if you look at the environment code, actually, which created the urban Forestry Council, that ordinance sets out kind of a broader scope of authority for the urban Forestry Council including trees on private lands. You dont have this in handout form, do you, the presentation . Oh, goodness, i dont. I totally neglected to do that. My bad . Environment and no paper, wasnt thinking. [ laughter ] ok, so the point of this slide is just to say that the urban forest is larger than, obviously, just the public realm of that which is in the jurisdiction of public works and, of course, includes private properties and parks and open spaces and trees all over the city. Trees are no everywhere and we steward other lands in the city which are remnants of San Franciscos natural ecosystem, such as bernell hill. And so, indeed, urban forestry and ecological restoration and all of these activities of managing plants, managing trees and planting new trees, all important aspects of our citys Climate Action strategy and so, withizero, 80, 100 roots, roots symbolizes Climate Mitigation and adaptation. And so the other thing i wanted to say about that was just simply, obviously, trees and other plants store and sequester carbon and, in fact, these are three trees other than streets that do a good job of that and this is one of the, you know, Main Services that trees provide within the city is storing and sequestering carbon but there are many other services that trees provide. Ill just go over those one by one. Even supervisor mar covered this presentation already. So obviously great for mitigating the heat island effect that cities create with our concrete and asphalt all over the place and trees provide really important shade and Energy Savings for buildings, especially our days, we have hotter days in San Francisco as projected with Climate Change. And also for storm water capture. So evergreen trees and broadleaf evergreen trees will capture a lot of rainfall and, thus, reduce urban runoff. And obviously, through foe foe photosynthesis trees creat creae oxygen and take pollutants out of the year. The california buckeye for the butterfly, tree can provide habitat for our native critters. And just to focus on the quality of life aspect that trees provide, so obviously traffic calming and again, pedestrian and bicycle safety, really kind of a nature connection in the built environment and as supervisor mar pointed out, really contributing to Better Mental Health and physical health in the city. And so in summary, trees can provide services for both people and wildlife in the built environment and these benefits need to be enjoyed by every person in San Francisco in every neighborhood and because as we know, the communities are most vulnerable to the effects of Climate Change that are happening now, already announcemenand ithink with thatt over to dan flanagan who will talk about the council. Thank you, supervisor mar, for holding this hearing. I am the chair of the urban Forest Council and im also the executive director of the friends of the urban forest, which i think you all probably know already. I also took a different look at how i wanted to talk to you today and ill repeat some of the things. You did capture a lot of things about urban forestry and forgive me if i repeat some of them, but i like to start with a simple quote by al gore who says the best Available Technology pulling Carbon Monoxide from the air is called a tree and it was in a to newspaper article this year. Its a good article and i recommend you all look at it. I think we have a roadmap for what to do about trees in San Francisco. In 2015, we di the forest urban council, ufc, and public works and they came up with a comprehensive plan and it was three parts. The first part was for street trees. The second part was for park trees and the last part is for backyard trees and green buildings. And now, the recommendation for the first part, which is the only part thats been finalized was maximize the benefit of urban trees and thats something that we can do now because with the passage of prop e, now a city can control what type of species tree we want to put in the streets of San Francisco. And we want to look very carefully about planting large trees, trees that can capture large amounts of co2 as possible. The second was to grow the population by half, 50 . We were thinking in those days we would grow it by half and now more like 40 or 35 . And the third one because we have made progress . Ill talk about that later. Establishing a fund for citywide Street Tree Maintenance Program and we start that off with the street tree sf and prop e. The last one was to manage street trees throughout the entire life cycle and when you have a tree come down, instead of chipping it, lets use some of the wood in turn fir furnitu. It was the first time weve done that in the city. We found out, actually, for years we thought we had 105,000 street trees and now we have 124,000, almost 125,000 street trees but in that process, we learned we asked the people doing the survey how many opportunities do we have to plant new trees in the city all throughout the city. And we came up with a number of about 40,000 trees. Now that number would be probably reduced when youre looking at underground utilities, et cetera. So i think you still have about 35,000 street trees you could put in the city. So one of the big things we did was we passed prop e back in 2016 and we got 78. 6 of the vote and think that drove home the reality that this city really cares about trees. And they really want to put money towards taking care of our trees. And we are now the only city in the United States and probably the world that has a dedicated Funding Source for the care of our street trees and an additional 45 to 30,000 trees and that money is put aside in perpetuity and will grow according to the size of the budget in perpetuity also. And the most important thing is, and we have to remind everybody because the population forgets, this money comes into play after the tree is established. So a tree has to be established for three years and then prop e takes care of the tree. So thats the gap that were all talking about. And so right now, that budget gap is, you have dedicated Funding Source which is 23 million. Is it 23 million for prop e . Yeah, 23 million. Well, whatever. 20 toward planting. But the only dedicated funding we have currently for planting trees is 2. 3 million. So that is what we need to Pay Attention to. And you folks, we need help in that tremendously. Now, weve been talking about trees planted, trees removed and it shows you that obviously were removing more trees now and were cutting were not planting as many trees and supervisor mar mentioned that. It looks bad on the surface. But im going to take a controversial point of view. This is an example of us managing our urban forest for the first nam time in a long ti. Were dealing with 40 years of deferred maintenance and i think public works is doing an excellent job of going out there. They identified 12,000 trees in our survey that need to be removed because they were dangerous. They would prune some of those trees. There were 8400 trees that need to be removed and they have removed about 4,000 of those in the past two years. This is something were moving through in the next couple of years. So in about three or four years and actually public works is working very carefully on this right now and seriously, about trying to scope out what needs to be removed in the next couple of years. And they will be doing that and the good news is, we can do that with prop of e money. Were very lucky to do that. These are trees that desperately need to be removed because people within takin werent takr years. But the problem is, do we have the money to replace those . So one effort driving factors in public works is equitable distribution of our canopy. Now, this is a map that was produced by it planning doesnt and it really shows you there are parts of the city where the canopy is very, very small. In general, we have a small canopy to begin with. Now one of the things i like talking about, which i get a lot of grief for, is that im from the east coast. Many of us are from the east coast and your experience in the city is those city its were carved out of forests. And those cities have urban forestry, they have trees in their d. N. A. This city was planted on grasslands and sand downs. Dune. I said look at the booklet car chase, seven minutes on youtube. Watch it. There are no trees in the early 80s. And somebody went back and did that and there are trees now. With the passage of prop e, its becoming embedded in our d. N. A. That trees are really important, because we have 78. 6 of the population that have voted to say we need to put money to take care of them and most of those people dont realize we havent put any money to planting trees. And its becoming more and more important that we plant trees because were losing more trees. And thats the major message i want to send to you today. In the next couple of years, we have to look at funding mechanisms for planting trees in sanfrancisco. Weve declared a Climate Emergency and there will be a lot of talking today and youve mentioned, trees are probably the best way not the best way, but one of the best ways to adapt to a changing climate. And im not going to talk about benefit of trees. Everyone will be talking about that today but it beaut beautife city and it calms people down to look at greenery. Here are the key things. We need to replace trees and we need new trees. The replacement trees will be a big thing Going Forward and the natural atransitionion to an urban forest is 4 and we will need to replace trees for the foreseeable future, but again, i go back to it and we need to equalize a canopy and that is in many parts of the city and not fair. Its an issue of social justice and thats what were doing right now. Were trying to plant as many trees as possible. I have to call out supervisor safaye. I think he planted 2,000 trees in his district over past couple of years and he goes door to door and ive seen him do that trying to convince people they need trees in front of their home. And i wish each one of you would do the same. It would be great. So we have an urban forest plan and there are two more parts. The second part is park tree. I hope soon that the parks will be able to complete their phase of the urban forest plan. Now, its clear that our parks were built and planted over 100 years ago and many of the trees that you have in those parks are sinessing right now. We have them in parks and backyards and backyards have a lot of the cappy and theyre forward stress because of the infill and this is the third rail of urban forestry because you come against bouncing Community Interest versus property rights, but its something we have to Pay Attention to. Actually, the urban Forest Council is doing a study of the best practises of how to protect backyard trees and well be hopefully having findings in the very near future. So i really believe we are on the cusp of taking the city, San Francisco had the absolute worse tree policy possible before 2016 and we can become a leader of tree management in the United States. Right now we have our first piece with prop e and i know public works, friends in the forest, we get countless calls of how did you do this . This is unique and we need to continue to work on this and now we need a dedicated Funding Source to do the planting, which is absolutely and we need to have equality in where we want. In conclusion, secure planting funds for the new trees to equalize our canopy and protect the trees we currently have. That has to be Planning Department has to be very diligent in talking to people and developers and realize that our Green Infrastructure, a 30yearold tree is really important. Weve already invested a ton of time in that tree to take it down without doing a workaround. Youve lost all that opportunity for that tree to grow for another 20 years and third, secure funds for restocking our parks and four, invest in detail technology to manage all of our street trees. Public works has started work wig thworkingwith the departmenf technology. We need for data and we need to understand what our forestry is doing so we can make decisions Going Forward is lastly, protect the backyard trees. So thank you very much and basically, i want to go back to what al gore said, its really simple. This is not rocket science. We need to plant trees and we need to take care of trees that we already have. And i think now is the time for trees. Thank you very much. Mr. Flanagan, thank you so much for the presentation and for all of your leadership on these important issue. I had a few questions about some of your slides. Theres that one that you showed the chart on tree removal, which went up significantly in the past year and then Tree Planting has declined. So therefore, think in the past year, there was a loss, a net loss of 2500 street trees in sanfrancisco. And i was just wanting to know so you explained the reason for the increase in tree removal is thats because now dpw has a real Street Tree Maintenance Program, removing the trees that are not healthy and removed for various reasons but what was the reason for the decline in Tree Plantings . Because i said, what is our dedicated Funding Source for street Tree Planting . I i think it was a gas tax and thats the only mone