Planning Commission Regular Meeting/Work Session

James FeatherWe have one item that does not require a public hearing. That is final consideration of the urban forest master plan. I'll first recognize Mr. Napty.

Anna SaffordstaffOkay. Good evening, Planning Commission. As Paul mentioned, I'm here to provide a presentation on the final urban forest master plan. Tonight during the presentation, I want to provide acknowledgments for those that participated and assisted with this planning effort. I'll also provide a higher level overview of the project background, including the project's goals and timelines. And then we will jump into an overview of the urban forest master plan itself. and then we'll wrap up with a discussion specifically on the implementation there were a lot of questions and discussion and the December meetings around implementation so trying to address those questions and then I'll open it up for any other discussion and comments you may all have

Sprout Initiative. The Sprout Initiative was developed using those key recommendations from the 2021 Urban Forestry Program Evaluation Report. And it was directly to develop and implement an urban forest management plan, which I'll touch on again later, but wanted to provide context now. So again, as you're aware, the project has produced the city's first ever urban forest master plan. The goal was to create a 20-year roadmap for the stewardship of Fairfax's urban forest through protection, regulation, growth, and management. The project included assessing existing conditions, engaging the community, identifying the vision, goals, and priorities of the urban forest, developing objective strategies and actions,

and providing implementation guidance. These five elements helped ensure that the plan accurately represented existing conditions, the community's views and priorities and creating actionable recommendations for the city. The project was broken into two phases. Phase one focused on information gathering and community engagement. It kicked off in June of 2024 and completed in early 2025 where we moved into phase two, the development of the urban forest master plan itself. We are now here not in January, but in February of 2026 with a final plan. And we'll be presenting to city council, like Paul said tomorrow night for their consideration of adoption. The project had public engagement throughout both phases of the project.

At project events, we engaged directly with 150 stakeholders, but many more throughout the projects, updates to boards and commissions, events. We had a survey and poetry contest and then we had over 2,700 unique visitors to our engaged Fairfax webpage where folks provided comment and were able to review documents. The public's role of course played a big part in shaping the urban forest master plan. The as a summary of the engagement process. An engagement, all engagement activities were tracked throughout the project in a database which then was provided to staff as a resource to use in the future. So that's the project background. Now moving on to highlighting the Urban Forest Master Plan itself.

this is a 20-year planning horizon as well as, again, an adaptive management process, for the plan to be a living and active document. So going into a few details of each of these chapters the first being what do we have establishing the baseline the six components for the urban forest master plan included an analysis of the city's land cover data it reviewed the 2023 public tree inventory it did an assessment of non-native invasive species on public land it benchmarked to similar cities and estimated urban forest benefits using the US Forest Service ITRE calculator. Notably it found that tree canopy cover makes up 40% of the city's land area. It found that the city's urban forest operations are largely reactive and in response to staff

efforts, and a consistent interest in learning more about the urban forest and how to get involved with it. These key takeaways help shape then these goals on the slide. We have three goals to champion and sustain a resilient and equitable urban forest in Fairfax, increase Fairfax's capacity to care for trees and three strengthen the community support and involvement in the urban forest then the third step how do we get there again this is the implementation plan of the urban forest master plan it ties the information from the first two chapters the existing conditions and the vision and goals for the future into objectives strategies and actions to be implemented The objectives are the key outcomes to achieve, the strategies are the approaches, and the actions are specific tasks.

The Urban Forest Master Plan has five objectives. Protect, strengthen tree and forest conservation. Regulate, enhance city policies to protect and expand tree canopy, both in content and process. Grow, create space, plant, and care for new trees. manage establish a dedicated urban forestry division for all urban forestry activities and engage foster community stewardship for Fairfax's urban forest again each of these has many strategies and actions to help facilitate the implementation for example manage has an objective or strategy to scale internal capacity through a centralized urban forestry This strategy includes actions such as consulting the 2024 operations review, aligning staff responsibilities to this new division, and supporting staff development.

and another is increased survival rate of newly planted trees to greater than 90%. The progress assessment timeline includes an annual review to be reported out in the state of the urban forest report and then a five-year review to use a progress report and addendum that adjusts and adapts to the changing conditions. After over four different five periods you come to the 20 year planning horizon where you then would start the process over and develop a new urban forest master plan. So touching on some of the revisions we've made since the December presentations we received some great questions asking about how to predict changes to the urban forest particularly climate impacts invasive species and other urban forest health impacts in

response to this we added an action to strategy 1.2 strategy 1.2 is around conserving connecting and expanding tree canopy the new action recommends partnerships with regional jurisdictions to help support urban forest forecasting and modeling around canopy and climate change canopy change and climate change We recognize the urban forest master plan itself cannot actually forecast or include forecasting of these changes. A lot of that data is usually done at a county, state, or regional level. And so in addition, we also recommended partnering with the COGS Regional Tree Action Plan, integrating with the city's comprehensive plan and other long-range planning documents. So you're using multiple planning and strategies at different scales in order to assess the impacts of climate change.

And then lastly, we heard again a lot of questions around implementation. So I thought I'd take a moment to kind of address what's next after the Urban Forest Master Plan is adopted. We recognize there's concerns around budgeting. There's a lot here in the plan. As I've presented over the past slides, there's five main objectives, 21 strategies, and 171 actions. And so it is a lot of work. I do want to point out a lot of them are or would become ongoing tasks that would get integrated to staff's everyday work. We have identified over 40 of the action items are already underway. way. And so it's a plan that is already in motion by staff's current work to a certain extent. And I wanted to touch on and use some of the points from the project background

slides of some of the projects and how it relates to the Urban Forest Master Plan moving forward. So first being again that Urban Forestry Program Evaluation Report that was done five years ago and I think it's important to highlight how much work has been accomplished over the five years since that report first came out. And this plan helps provide that strategic roadmap moving forward. It provides transparency as to how we are doing work and how are we trying to achieve the community's priorities as well as still meeting those urban forest needs. And then second, reiterating the Sprout Initiative. Again, it was designed to not just develop an urban forest master plan, but it was designed to implement the urban forest master plan.

with that I just want to say it is a big milestone to adopt an urban forest master plan, and I think it's a good step forward for our urban forest. And so with that, I'll open up to any other questions or comments you all have.

James FeatherThank you very much. Just one introductory comment, and we'll open up to the commission for comments. You mentioned that impetus to do this was one of the action items from the comprehensive plan. Master Plan as a whole, it ultimately is going to address quite a number of other action items in the comprehensive plan. So we're not just fulfilling one objective here, really, or action item. There's going to be maybe a dozen, and they all relate to this urban forest master plan. It's a culmination of a lot of activity, effort, an important milestone for the city, and thank you for your and your team's leadership in getting us to this point. COMMISSION, ANY QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS OR DISCUSSION? WE'LL MAKE IT EASY. WE HAVE SEEN IT, OF COURSE, A FEW TIMES.

Paul Nabtistaffspaces should be not just how much of it we should have. Offer flexibility for alternative compliance for minimum tree canopy and street tree placement. So these two red bars I apologize are not showing where they are supposed to be on the screen. One of them should be circling this item. There are two items that we identified that city staff would take the lead on as we started this process with our consultant and this is one of them. The urban forest master plan you just discussed tonight is going to city council to be considered for adoption tomorrow. Has recommendations about establishing a tree preservation ordinance and so this is something that the city was going to start doing on our own anyway and you might remember bourbon staffer

Tomorrow, City Council meeting, they will be having their public hearing on the Urban Forest Master Plan. They will receive their presentation from you on the Capital Improvement Program recommendations. And they have a work session on the Willard Sherwood Community Center project. For your next meeting, February 23rd, in addition to continuing our discussion on the smaller plan zoning ordinance amendments, One of the items that was canceled at the January meeting was the discussion on your annual report and update on implementation guides. We didn't want to move that tonight because we had enough going on. So that will be happening on the 23rd instead. I mentioned the public meeting that has been scheduled for March 26th on the small air plan zoning ordinance amendments.