272 O'Herrin and Shields: Assessing Municipal Forestry Activity in Texas, U.S. is a professional with the necessary qualifications (USDA 2012; O’Herrin 2013). So it’s a concern that about 27% of communities responding to this question (n = 62) reported 0 staff, indicating they don’t have even one employee on staff who dedi- cated at least 25% of their time to urban forestry— these were all small- or medium-sized cities. This survey question wasn’t concerned with the qualifications of the staff responsible for managing the urban forest. Rather, researchers were trying to determine if any employee spends even 25% of their time on trees. The sur- vey found 16 (36%) small and medium cities responding to this question (n = 47) had 0 FTE employees in charge of urban forestry. Of those 16 cities, only two (8%) had a tree board, and only four (16%) had a non-profit tree advocacy group. Unless many small and medium Texas cities rely exclusively on contractors to manage their urban forest, there is clearly a gap in small and medium Texas cities that needs to be filled with some type of urban forestry leadership. Ordinances This survey of Texas cities (Table 3) found that 58% of communities had the basic ordinance that “provides guidance on planting, maintain- ing, and removing trees on public property. . .” This compares with 62% of Oregon communities (Ries et al. 2007) that reported they had a munici- pal tree ordinance or other codes related to trees, and 80% of California communities (Thompson 2006) that reported they had a “tree ordinance.” Table 2. Characterization of staff by city size class. City size Respondents Small (pop. 5,000–29,999) Medium (pop. 30,000–99,999) Large (pop. 100,000–499,999) Mega (pop. 500,000 and greater) Overall 28 18 12 4 62 Treiman et al. (2011) found that 26% of city department heads (n = 521) and 50% of urban for- esters (n = 28) in Missouri, U.S. responded that their community had “policies for tree preserva- tion during development and/or construction.” The results from Texas showed that 48% of communi- ties required tree protection on private property during construction activity. Treiman et al. (2011) reported that tree preservation became more com- mon as city size increases, while the current study found that all types of tree ordinances generally became more common as city size increases, with only a slight decline among mega cities (Table 3). Ordinances that extend to private property may oſten become controversial before, during, and aſter they are written into local law. This includes ordinances regulating the removal of trees on pri- vate property (43%) or require trees to be pro- tected during construction on private property (48%). The basic tree ordinance is referred to here as “basic” because it doesn’t regulate trees on pri- vate property, and thus passing it would probably not be controversial. Yet only 58% of cities had passed the basic tree ordinance—hardly more than had passed the more controversial ordinances. Table 3 shows that all the ordinance types gener- ally became more common as city size increased. Smaller communities may not see the need to protect or guide the management of their smaller public tree populations. Additionally, advocacy groups also became more common as city size increased. These advocates may have been play- ing a large role in the passage of tree ordinances. Average number of staff 1.5 1.4 4.9 28.8 3.9 Table 3. Percent of affirmative responses for tree ordinance components by city size class. City size Respondents Small (pop. 5,000–29,999) Medium (pop. 30,000–99,999) Large (pop. 100,000–499,999) Mega (pop. 500,000 and greater) Overall 35 26 14 4 79 Provide basic 40 85 50 75 58 Tree board or employee guidance (%) mandated (%) 34 42 64 50 43 31 46 57 75 43 Residents per staff member 8,582 46,181 67,427 60,764 34,675 Regulate private tree removal (%) Require tree protection during construction on private property (%) 37 54 57 75 48 ©2016 International Society of Arboriculture
July 2016
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