Group Seeking a Leafier San Diego as Budget Ax Topples Tree Upkeep

Call it tree triage.

Faced with a shrinking budget that pays to service only about an eighth of San Diego’s city-owned trees, park officials acknowledge that they are setting priorities.

“Each day becomes kind of a Russian roulette--you say, ‘Which are the worst of the worst?’ ” said Karl Schnizler, who is in charge of tree maintenance for San Diego’s Park and Recreation Department. Ideally, he said, “we do certain types of tree trimming for the health and proper growth of the tree. But that’s not happening.”

That, says Norma Assam, is where she comes in. Assam is president of People for Trees, a 9-month-old, 200-member, nonprofit group dedicated to making San Diego greener--from the grass roots up. Her goal: to plant 1 million trees by the year 2000.

Assam, whose fledgling group has no office, no copier and no clerical help, knows all about budgetary constraints. But she hopes that, by increasing public support for green space and by working to change city ordinances, People for Trees will make it easier for politicians to set aside funds to maintain the estimated 200,000 acacias, eucalyptuses, figs, gums, jacarandas, oaks, palms and other city-owned trees.

Today, San Diego’s first official Arbor Day, represents a victory for Assam. In October, she went to the San Diego City Council and asked them to establish a citywide holiday to help educate the public about the need for trees. She got her wish: the council voted to celebrate trees each year on the first Saturday in December, and several council members joined in an Arbor Day tree-planting drive Assam organized.

Deputy Mayor Judy McCarty will be at Mission Trails Regional Park today to help plant 150 5-gallon coast live oaks. Councilmen Bob Filner, Bruce Henderson, Wes Pratt and Ron Roberts will be planting as well, from Ocean Beach Park to downtown San Diego. By the end of the day, Assam predicts, San Diego will have more than 400 new trees.

Judging by the recent record, however, the Arbor Day celebration says more about People for Trees’ persistence than it does about city officials’ commitment to a leafier San Diego. In October, the City Council rejected a financing plan for large-scale tree replanting, deciding instead to hope for an outbreak of volunteerism among developers and private citizens.

The rejection comes at a time when the city is removing about 1,000 trees from city land each year--most because their roots are damaging sidewalks. According to city policy, if a tree in the city right of way severely damages the sidewalk, the city will cut down the tree and replace the sidewalk. It will not replace the tree.

In total, the city replaces no more than 200 trees a year, all of them in public parks, said Schnizler. What’s more, he said, the city hasn’t had a street-tree replacement program since the mid-1970s. That treeless trend can also be seen in the way Schnizler’s budget is dwindling. In fiscal year 1988-89, the tree maintenance section of the Park and Recreation Department had a budget of $1,448,998. That included $449,000 set aside to hire contractors to maintain the city’s trees, including a program that trimmed palms annually. But, by May, two months before the fiscal year ended, the section had run out of money.

This year should be worse. The budget for fiscal year 1989-1990 is less--$1,260,946--including only $125,000 for contract work, or $324,000 less than last year. As of July 1, Schnizler said, the city has stopped regularly trimming its palms.

“If we were fully funded (for contract work), we’d probably need a little over $1 million,” Schnizler said. “We have $125,000, and we spend $100,000 of that on tree removals alone.”

The city hasn’t even counted its trees in two decades. The last city tree inventory was conducted in 1966, when the number of city trees lining the streets was 72,000 and the number of city trees in parks was 30,000. Today, city officials estimate San Diego has twice that number--about 150,000 street trees and 60,000 park trees on city land. Many of those trees, Assam said, are either the offspring of mature trees or were planted by property owners in the city right of way.

Although the number of trees has doubled, the staff of the tree maintenance section has shrunk. In 1968, Schnizler’s first year working for the city, he remembers that the section employed a team of about 40. Today there are 28 people, and, of those, only 23 actually trim trees.

“Either people are super-efficient--and if you believe that, I’ve got two bridges in Mission Bay I’d like to sell you--or we’re simply doing less than we were,” Schnizler said.

As a result, he said, San Diegans will notice more tree debris this winter, more falling palm fronds and tree branches that in previous years would have been trimmed. If the city is hit by storms, he said, such debris could pose a safety hazard.

“There is always a possibility that someone could be hurt” by a falling tree limb, Schnizler said. “If it happens frequently enough, there’s a good chance somebody’s going to be under it.”

The news that San Diego has no resources to nurture its existing trees, let alone 1 million more saplings and seedlings, doesn’t faze Assam. Her urban tree-planting program is designed to get private citizens to pitch in. People for Trees will help provide treeless communities with the greenery they desire--but only if each property owner signs a contract agreeing to maintain the tree on his land for at least two years.

The group recently joined with Councilwoman McCarty’s office to complete such a project on Waring Road in Allied Gardens, Assam said. They planted 52 fern pines, leaving barren only the lots whose owners would not sign.

“In five or six years, that whole street will be shaded and beautiful,” she said happily. “This is an idea whose time has come.”

Recently, People for Trees won a $42,000 grant from the state to buy and plant trees in the San Diego area. A local radio station has contributed $3,000, two tree nurseries gave 350 eucalyptus, melaluca and other exotic trees, and a private citizen donated 500 more.

Now what Assam wants is a citizens’ tree advisory board that would look at the existing city policies--like the one that calls for removing trees if roots are buckling sidewalks--and recommend changes to the City Council. And, she says, an office wouldn’t be bad either.

“We have to educate the public to want trees and tree-plantings,” Assam said. “The thing that scares people off is they think, ‘$100 a tree! My gosh!’ But that’s what it costs. If we taxed people just $1 a year--just think of how many trees that would buy!”

Schnizler, meanwhile, isn’t holding his breath.

“The city has some real financial problems at this moment,” he said, ticking off a list of them, from crime to drugs, that he believes will continue to come first. “If you were a councilperson, probably high on your list would not be trees. Where trees fit into that hierarchy, I don’t know.”