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Trees in Calgary

Urban Outdoorsman said:
I actually work for an arborist and I have to say that needing a permit to remove trees is a dumb idea. We do a lot of work in a community where permits are needed to remove trees and it's literally dumb how much bureaucracy is involved just to remove a dead or dangerous tree.

That being said, grants for homeowners to plant trees is a great idea, especially if those trees where good canopy trees and long living.

I gotta say the cities urban forestry program is pretty weak overall. They should be planting 3x the number of trees they are and we really should be creating more space for trees in how we design streets and sidewalks regardless land use.
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When I lived in Washington state, the municipality had a bylaw requiring approval to remove trees. All that did was encourage people to poison trees so that they could obtain the permit.

The City of Calgary should focus on sustaining the trees that it plants before planting more. Seems like a large number of trees planted on City land don't survive due to lack of water, exposure to road salt, planting in poor locations or planting at the wrong time of year. When I lived there, planting between mid April and mid June seemed best to set trees up for survival. Planting in the Fall seemed to almost always fail.
 
I'd like to see the city do both things. Encourage people to plant and maintain on their property as well as have a more active tree planting/maintenance program. Especially along some of the boulevards and roads.

Maybe the city could start some sort of trust or endowment fund strictly for trees. Start off with a lump sum, and add an amount each year until the fund gets to a decent size. It would be nice when the fund got to a point where it could add a good number of trees every year. With such a fund they might be able to get money from the province or feds as part of climate change initiatives.
 
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Surrealplaces said:
I'd like to see the city do both things. Encourage people to plant and maintain on their property as well as have a more active tree planting/maintenance program. Especially along some of the boulevards and roads.

Maybe the city could start some sort of trust or endowment fund strictly for trees. Start off with a lump sum, and add an amount each year until the fund gets to a decent size. It would be nice when the fund got to a point where it could add a good number of trees every year. With such a fund they might be able to get money from the province or feds as part of climate change initiatives.
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Why not just fund planting trees, to get the benefit today for spending today? Even better, the city could draw down existing reserves to do it. Existing reserves are excessive imo even after the arena money comes out:

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If the city's reserves grew in COVID, grew during the aftermath of the office glut. Weren't drawn down a huge amount for the floods: what are they for? They're just accounting games at this point.
 
darwink said:
Why not just fund planting trees, to get the benefit today for spending today? Even better, the city could draw down existing reserves to do it. Existing reserves are excessive imo even after the arena money comes out:

View attachment 564380
If the city's reserves grew in COVID, grew during the aftermath of the office glut. Weren't drawn down a huge amount for the floods: what are they for? They're just accounting games at this point.
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I think we are going to need this for the Greenline........
 
darwink said:
Why not just fund planting trees, to get the benefit today for spending today? Even better, the city could draw down existing reserves to do it. Existing reserves are excessive imo even after the arena money comes out:
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Agreed, that would be my first choice, but it comes back the age old issue of funding anything. We could have been doing this today or anytime in the past decades, but it hasn't happened, or hasn't happened enough. The fund is more about making sure there's always money for it every year no matter what the budget situation or council at a given time looks like.
 
Surrealplaces said:
Agreed, that would be my first choice, but it comes back the age old issue of funding anything. We could have been doing this today or anytime in the past decades, but it hasn't happened, or hasn't happened enough. The fund is more about making sure there's always money for it every year no matter what the budget situation or council at a given time looks like.
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An endowment trust fund is a good idea and it would work. There’s no downside except. that we wouldn’t see the benefits from it for another 30 or 40 years.
If the city had created one like 50 years ago, we’d be planting a couple of thousand trees every year from the fund.
 
A quick, primitive number crunch shows if the city had started such a fund years 30 ago by adding as little as $2 million a year for the first 30 years and keeping all interest earnings for the first 20 years it could be as high as $100 million today.
This year the fund would produce ~ $5-7 million in earnings and if they put half toward trees while keeping the other half to the fund this year would mean the purchasing and planting of 1000-1500 trees depending on size and variety.
It’s never too late to start a fund like this as long as it’s in excess of the regular tree planting budget.
 
Always_Biking said:
A quick, primitive number crunch shows if the city had started such a fund years 30 ago by adding as little as $2 million a year for the first 30 years and keeping all interest earnings for the first 20 years it could be as high as $100 million today.
This year the fund would produce ~ $5-7 million in earnings and if they put half toward trees while keeping the other half to the fund this year would mean the purchasing and planting of 1000-1500 trees depending on size and variety.
It’s never too late to start a fund like this as long as it’s in excess of the regular tree planting budget.
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Why not just spend the money. It isn’t better to wait. Additional trees also accrue compounding benefits over time.

There is no reason to wait. You don’t end up with net more trees by waiting. For a very very long time.

I swear the Alberta heritage fund has poisoned Albertans minds.

It isn’t like there is surplus revenue to do this at the city level that we want to remove from the economy, which is the main benefit (of the investing generation) of a sovereign wealth fund.

The fund’s purpose is not to act like a huge retirement account even if that is a side benefit. The main purpose is to turn one time revenue (oil and gas) into recurring revenue because it is highly inequitable to spend today when we as a society also benefit from the economic activity directly via employment.

A significant side benefit is reducing Dutch disease by explicitly not investing any of the money in your home country/currency.

Any ways. If we want more trees we should spend money to plant trees. Why would we expect our descendants to want to plant trees with money we saved for them when we don’t want to spend money we currently have saved on trees?
 
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