Mark of austerity

Chico’s Public Works Department got an earful Monday evening (March 25) during the Bidwell Park and Playground Commission’s first meeting since the tree-cutting blunder this newspaper wrote about a few weeks ago (see “Oak grove chainsaw massacre,” Newslines, March 14).

More than a dozen speakers chided the city for gross incompetence related to the felling of at least 27 valley oaks in Bidwell Park. That happened at a grove adjacent to the Chico Creek Nature Center during a project to reduce fire fuels, including vegetative debris and numerous nonnative catalpa trees.

Erik Gustafson, Chico’s director of public works-operations and maintenance, gave a presentation about the incident. Short version: The city screwed up. For starters, trees within the project area were marked inconsistently, or “all over the board,” as Gustafson put it. Much of the damage occurred while a supervisor was tending to tasks elsewhere in the park, he said.

Gustafson offered up an extensive mea culpa. Park Division Manager Linda Herman spoke as well, responding to specific queries. Why, for example, weren’t biologists consulted on the project? Answer: because just a handful of trees were supposed to be extracted. The Chico administrators’ narrative seemed to resonate with the commission’s members—the majority of whom were sworn in only last month—though citizens at the meeting seemed less mollified.

In attendance were a couple of tree experts. One didn’t believe that only 27 oaks were taken down—he’d counted 35 and asked for more transparency. The other calculated the value of the fallen oaks at over $220,000.

Gustafson noted that an internal investigation is ongoing, but the city already has adopted numerous measures to make sure nothing like this happens again. Those include establishing uniform tree-marking protocols; making sure the urban forest manager is consulted for tree removals beyond urgent ones (trees damaged by storms, for example); running larger-scope projects by the commission; noticing the public about such work; and training park staff, contractors and volunteers. Furthermore, the city will plant 36 trees of similar species in the park and transfer $13,000 from the Park Division budget to tree-planting.

To me, the most interesting thing to note from the meeting was a narrative that underscores a longtime gripe of this newspaper: the lack of resources devoted to park maintenance. The Park Division’s budget, in particular, took a major hit during the Great Recession. Staff has been stretched thin ever since, as evidenced by the aforementioned supervisor having to duck out and, thus, not stopping the errant tree-cutting. Commission Vice Chair Aaron Haar nailed it when he attributed the botched job to austerity.

Another item of note: Commissioner Lise Smith-Peters’ suggestion to create a vegetation management plan based on park zones. It wasn’t discussed in depth, but from what I gather, it would be a framework for what to remove—including where, when and how.

Yet another: an endowment to generate desperately needed park maintenance funds. Considering the park has been chronically shortchanged in the annual budget—and how barrels of ink in these pages calling for increased allocations have fallen on blind eyes—that might not be such a bad idea.