City Council Meeting

Shinneberryclerkour next item is the urban forest master plan update on the one-year plan and the five-year outlook i'm going to recognize anna safford our urban forester for the staff presentation I'm not sure if it is.

Anna SaffordstaffMaybe you should do it. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Good evening, Mayor and City Council. Tonight I am here to provide a summary overview of the Urban Forest Master Plan's one-year implementation plan and five-year implementation outlook. Before getting into the presentation, I figured I'd orient you to the other materials I provided in the staff report. The staff memo does provide a description for each of those supporting documents. The important ones to note are the full Excel spreadsheets of the one-year implementation plan. that are proposed to be initiated in 2026. And then the next spreadsheet is the five-year outlook. These are all the actions within the urban forest master plan that have been listed with a one to

So the next few slides are the overview of the one-year plan and five-year outcomes. On the left hand of these slides, we have, again, the actions we anticipate starting in 2026, identified as ongoing tasks. As we build upon the one year actions we look on the right hand side and we have five year outcomes. These are you can think of them as deliverables or results. In the urban forest master plan they were identified and called strategy metrics. And then at the bottom of the slides we also include the identified lead and support roles that were included in the implementation table of the master plan. So starting with the first objective, protect. In 2026, we will begin a natural areas assessment of the city's

Next, moving on to regulate. In 2026, we'd be starting or we have started reviewing our existing tree regulations within the zoning ordinance as we mentioned this evening. Continue embedding the urban forest master plan goals into city plans, policies, and capital projects. This is an initial effort in 2026 but would be anticipated to be an ongoing effort as of course policies and capital projects continue. And then developing policies or further developing policies for capital improvement projects. As we complete and work on this we would anticipate our tree conservation regulations being updated with an alignment with state enabled legislation. We would have a tree replacement policy issued for both capital projects and city operations.

significant support from our sustainability division, the environmental sustainability committee and Parks and Rec. Next are a few graphics from the urban forest master plans dashboard. I'm currently using the project management software monday.com to track both the urban forest master plan as well as everyday tasks and so they're being tracked alongside each other. On the first one status as you can see for actions with a one to five year timeline approximately have been initiated to some sort of extent. On the bottom left we have barriers. Barriers were the resource demand boxes included in each of the strategies in the urban forest master plan. Within the one to five year time actions you can see about two thirds of them relate to existing capacity.

and currently have many barriers to implementation. And again, this is the one to five year actions. Next is also one of the dashboard graphics for our key performance indicators. Again, the full table was provided as an attachment and this is table eight from the Urban Forest Master Plan. We have 13 KPIs in our plan. They are mapped to our three main goals. As you can see, goal number one and goal number two show that we need the most improvement. Largely those improvements are around KPIs involving increasing canopy coverage in those low canopy neighborhoods, mostly around tree planting, increasing the young tree care, increasing staff capacity, as well as beginning to track tree maintenance and tree risk assessments

closely. And then we're having most success with our goal number three. A lot of that revolves around again public engagement, activities and volunteerism that we have through the Sprout initiative. Well, I think included in your materials but possibly not in the slides I do want to touch on the anticipated reporting cycles that we will be having. So on an annual basis you can expect a report out on the urban forest master plan's key performance indicators as well as a summary of the one year plan's strategy metrics, so those outcomes through the state of the urban forest report that we would share both publicly and with city council. Then on more of a quarterly basis we would be providing seasonal updates

likely through your weekly city council updates. You can think of these as upcoming projects or project summaries such as for significant tree removals or tree planting projects. And then we would continue our regular public engagement on a more bimonthly or monthly basis through various platforms again notifying the public on projects but then also education campaigns and engagement opportunities. The urban forest master plan does recommend refining how we report out to the public as well as coordinating these cycles as the program evolves and as work progresses but for now we're looking at an annual quarterly as well as periodic public engagement through those various platforms and then lastly we we wanted to briefly so the past few slides were a five-year look ahead

I'm not aware of their model. I know they're also doing more of a GIS assessment coming up on their areas. But I think right now our starting point is kind of getting an understanding of what we have throughout the city, whether it be city-owned or potentially not city-owned but potential areas we'd want conserved, and then kind of getting, being able to set a goal from there. And so I would foresee probably it would be in that next phase of the five to ten year phase, as well as if you recall in the Urban Forest Master Plan at five years, we would do a comprehensive review and updates. And so it could be something we can consider at that time. but I think it's hard to know how to set the goal until we kind of get an idea as to our baseline.

Rachel McQuillenOkay, thank you. And then several of your implementation items identified budget or staffing restraints or barriers. And I was just wondering which investments you would suggest have the greatest impact on achieving the goals of the Urban Forest Master Plan as we go into our next budget season and start those discussions. So