On Saturday morning, downtown residents awoke to a grisly murder scene. A dozen trees had been massacred in the dark of night. The damage was widespread and indiscriminate. A grove of majestic Ficus microcarpa that had cooled a busy bus stop for decades were all sawed cleanly in half. A row of Chinese elms that created a canopy for street vendors were lopped off parallel to the street, draping a gruesome pattern of leafy right triangles along the sidewalk. Entire blocks of shade had been eliminated overnight. It was, literally, a tree emergency.
I know the term because I've filed more than a few such requests on the city's 311 app. (Yes, there's a new app, and I'll be writing about it soon; I've been inputting some more challenging service requests to test how well it works.) In the last few weeks, I've reported a dead purple orchid tree shedding limbs on the sidewalk, a block of freshly planted desert willows that were leaning precariously after their stabilizing stakes had been removed, and perhaps most troubling, a set of three ficuses with their trunks layered in graffiti. I honestly don't even know how you triage that type of tree emergency. But I may not get to find out. So far, none of these tree emergencies have been addressed by city workers.
And then, on Monday, the mayor dropped her 2025 budget that included dramatic reductions in tree funding. The entire city's urban canopy is facing deep cuts.
In its attempt to close a $1 billion deficit, the mayor's budget is bleak, recommending the layoffs of 1,647 workers and the closure of entire departments. As Frank Stolze reported at LAist: "It's the most austere budget since the city was wracked by the 2008 recession." If you talk to anyone who works with trees in our city, they'll talk about how the 2008 recession decimated LA's urban forest. As budgets tighten, tree planting is reduced, but so is tree maintenance: watering, trimming, and pruning roots so they don't turn sidewalks into rubble. And that's exactly what happened after 2008. The situation got so bad that the city planned to cut down 12,000 trees so the ruptured sidewalks below them could be repaired — until a judge ordered the city to keep the trees and find a better way to fix the sidewalks.