Dear Editor:
As City Councilman and Vice Mayor from 2018 to 2022, I sought to elevate urban forest management to front and center of our policymaking. Trees play a critical role in improving air quality from car pollution, reducing the high occurrences of asthma among our children, and mitigating the urban heat island effect our city faces every summer. San Fernando suffers from these afflictions because trees were not an imperative of former elected officials.
Now, our commitment to green projects in San Fernando is unmatched – our city staff puts us in contention year in and year out for millions in federal and state funding. Money has recently flowed to San Fernando for transformational projects, like the underground water recapture project below San Fernando Recreation Park which during the most recent rainy season played an undisputed role in recharging our aquifers and water wells.
As a policymaker, I sought to emphasize the importance of establishing a “tree fund” dedicated to expanding tree planting, to create more tree wells rather than fewer (especially along Glenoaks Blvd), to increase the number of fruit trees to give away to residents, and perhaps most importantly, to weave trees into our city planning endeavors. My philosophy was simple – if we don’t spend now, we will spend 10x in the future. Why is it so hard to invest in our future?
As such, residents are rightly frustrated by our current approach to the selection, maintenance and preservation of our trees. During my tenure, it became evident that our departments were understaffed and overworked, unable to adequately implement and maintain robust urban forestry initiatives. It’s easy to put the blame on others or cite statistics that conflate the real issues. But the truth is nuanced and complicated, requiring a mindful approach to our tree planting.
One of the recurring obstacles we faced with projects like Calles Verdes with our friends at TreePeople was the shortsighted preference of non-native trees over native species. These seemingly innocuous decisions to place trees endemic to other places like Texas or Oklahoma, and not California, have far-reaching consequences that we see today and will continue to grapple with for years to come.
Native trees are inherently adapted to thrive in our local climate.
What does that mean, the reader may ask? Native trees offer a higher chance of survival in our urban landscape as they are better suited to our weather conditions and habitat. In short, they live longer and die less often.
Native trees also require less water and pruning. Our local wildlife has evolved in tandem with these native species, underpinning San Fernando’s biodiversity. One need only to look at the mighty oaks of Pasadena, or even the Fremont Cottonwoods one can see throughout the city, including at Rudy Ortega Park, to find thriving microclimates, happy critters, and plenty of shade. In Southern California we are truly blessed with a diverse palate of native trees – of all colors and sizes – ideal to fit any number of treewells, parks, and residences.
In contrast, non-native species, while disingenuously promoted as ‘drought-tolerant’ require more intensive maintenance and care, with higher mortality rates, leading to higher costs in both dollars and man hours for our staff. If a non-native tree dies once or twice, by the third, we have spent far more in time and treasure than if we had gone with a hearty, resilient native species. To further exacerbate these poor choices, the bottom-of-the-barrel rain bags that equip these trees are also grossly insufficient tools from yesteryear. Technology has quickly innovated, with many watering options that serve as recapture mechanisms that do not require refiling. We should explore these water bag options for our trees. But most importantly – by prioritizing California natives – we increase the resilience of San Fernando’s tree canopy and streamline our resources for more effective urban tree management.
Going further, integrating trees and landscaping into city planning should be a cornerstone of our policy approach. By way of example, with my colleagues and our city staff, we stipulated that dozens of trees be planted as a landscape barrier to the local SF swap meet to mitigate the heat island effect and beautify the area, with further subsidies for more trees along the Glenoaks thoroughfare (with many that remain to be planted). We urged the same along the perimeter of the newly renovated Layne Park to insulate from industrial dust and noise. These simple, commonsense ideas are not new to California planning commissions.
I urge our residents, our current council, local businesses and yes, our planning projects to think deeply about these approaches because they mirror the affinity our community has to better, more resilient, trees. We also need to implement planning initiatives that encourage planting by our businesses and residents. Two or three years of planting and watering reaps decades of shade, cleaner air and lower energy costs. The bottom line is if we as a city care about urban forest and the myriad benefits it provides, we must spend the money to mirror that commitment. The costs of not doing so are too great to ignore.
Hector A. Pacheco
Hector is a former Vice Mayor and lifelong resident of San Fernando.