City Council - Special Meeting

Good afternoon. Welcome to Kansas City Council workshop for Tuesday, 03/03/2026. We have one item on our agenda as urban forestry programs and policies and we have our ECD deputy director Matt Gilbert here welcome.

Thank you council president and council. I'm happy to be here tonight to start off a presentation that's been in the works since about August with a newly formed staff group we call the Urban Forestry Group. I guess that's our name now. It's kind of emerged over time. But this is about 10 members from Parks, ECD, and Public Works.

All of us have some role in stewarding the urban forest in Kent through regulations or through just being out there on the ground and collecting data and kind of everything in between. And so this group was formed largely in response to council interest in kind of where we are with the urban forest, things like canopy cover, specific sites, you know, the regulations that we impose on people with trees and how we manage things with our own property. Also, we have some upcoming state requirements for the storm water storm water code, or the storm water permit. It's called NPDES. It's a mouthful.

National Pollution Discharge Elimination System. So there's a permit there. They have some requirements for us with the with the tree canopy. So we thought it'd be very wise for us to get together as a group and understand what each other does, and so we can coordinate. And so I'm here tonight, or we're here tonight to share a bit of I'm here to talk about what we've learned.

There are folks from the various departments and sections here to talk about the specifics of what they do to steward the urban forest. And then also talk about some of these upcoming requirements. And finally, we're here to listen and take some feedback from the council. I've built a couple pauses within this presentation for questions, but please feel free to interrupt. But we'll try to get through this efficiently.

I wanted to start out with sort of from a generalist's perspective. I kind of consider myself a generalist with a lot of the regs and topics that the city touches. But some of the big themes that we have unearthed as we've talked in the urban forestry group. Some of them are obvious, some less so. But the first is that trees have a lot of benefits.

And I think these are things we can all kind of intuitively understand that trees help provide cleaner air, shade. They help to lower energy costs if your home happens to be in the shade of a tree. They provide traffic calming functions when they're near a road, when they're nice and tall, you kind of tend to slow down when you're driving next to tall things. They provide beauty and a sense of community pride. I think they as as we all could probably understand, when you drive through an old tree community, you have a sense of establishment, and that and there's some care and priority on beauty out in the public realm.

And so they do send a message about the community. So they're they they have a lot of different values. And that that's just kind of scratching the surface, and there's there's a lot of literature on this that can quantify it. But this is just as a summary. So lots of benefits.

Similarly, in the urban setting particularly, trees have a cost because instead of just growing out in the forest and kind of managing themselves, even though that's not always the case, but to a to a degree of forest can manage itself. But in when you start to introduce the urban elements like street trees, sorry, streets, and homes, and buildings, and things like that, it's a different it's a different it's a different game, I guess. You start to run into conflicts because trees need real estate and so do we. We run into they get into infrastructure, they can turn over sidewalks, they can create cracks in the roads and heaving and tripping hazards, things like that. Also, because trees requires their own real estate to grow and thrive, there are some land use trade offs that we have to think about there.

And I think we've explored that a little bit with the community so far where we talk about density. Know, this kind of came up in the middle housing discussions where we know the trees require real estate and so do people and there's got to be a balancing there. So that's really the hard part or the part for a lot of discussion. It's not that there are really no easy answers there. Trees require active management in order to provide maximum benefit.

If you can kind of squint and see the lines there. The big the heavy line coming off the tree there is the benefit of a tree with maintenance. And that's kind of getting back to all the benefits I talked about that, you know, they're healthy. They they sequester carbon. Now they take it out of the air and store it.

This is the shade, the oxygen, all those all those benefits really are maximized with care. That's pruning and watering and mulching and all the things that can keep a tree healthy. On the other hand, some of those other lines represent the benefits if you don't maintain trees. So you can probably stare at that for a while and absorb that. But basically, the message here is that urban trees require care to be beneficial and to lower the overall cost.

Because you know, once trees get old and out of hand, start to fall down, and they lose limbs, become a liability. So there there really is an input cost requirement there to really get the benefit. Some other themes that I just wanted to share that are kind of high level and maybe you can glean some of these from the other speakers tonight. What we've learned is that managing trees is complex and there are multiple objectives, like kind of coming from the fact that we have lots of things happening in one space. The job of an urban forester is to make decisions and make trade offs and to try to get the most value.

Sometimes that means removing trees. I mean, some if a sick tree is near your home or near a public space, we have to make decisions about when to take those out and how to evaluate the health, things like that. All of that takes time and money. They're balanced choices. Yeah.

It's very important. So the distinction that I appreciate now more than I did before this group formed was that portions of the urban forest are like a garden. And in a garden, you pull the weeds and you prune and you tend to things very actively. And you put a lot of energy into that and you put a lot of time into it. Now the more, you know, that's what you're going to see in the landscape beds or along the along the streets or when you're near buildings or near people or infrastructure.

If you get out and you get some more space, then the urban forest behaves more like a forest. That it tends to be a little bit less maintenance and it can it can it can work better with fewer human touches. Another big theme here is that we've seen is that risk management is something we really have to think about. When trees fall down, they can hurt people and they can damage property. And when the trees belong to the city, especially, that's something that we have to take very seriously to prevent people and property from being damaged.

As I said before, I say here housing needs space and so do trees. It's sort of like people in the built environment need space. And so we want to strike that balance. One other two more community demands. This has come up in our group where folks have talked about, you know, that you'll have some say some neighbors that border a park or a wetland or something like that.

And some want to keep all of the trees, and some would rather they be taken down so they feel safer when the wind blows. And so there's often not a clear consensus from the community. Again, that kind of gets to that urban foresters job of making balanced decisions. Finally, there's no such thing as a money tree. So that all of this takes time and money. And again, it's forcing us to try to make prudent and balanced decisions. So those were my big lessons. I hope that you can add to those or maybe you can think about those as the next presenters are up. We're going to start. I've got there are four of us, four more of us tonight.

First, we'll have Margaret Wagner from our parks department, Jennifer Harrell and Laura Herron from our public works department, and Nate Shieldmeyer from ECD. Nate will get up last to talk about regulations, and I think that'll be the next thing that we see coming. Just wanted to say that this will be the first of what I suspect to be several presentations around trees. I think each one of these people could probably do an hour by themselves on their own topics. So we're trying to keep this high level and prepare you for your future engagement with trees. So with that, I'll invite Margaret Wagner to come up and talk about data and what parks does. So thank you very much. Hi,

everybody. Good to see everybody again. Think you all have had the, I don't know, good or bad fortune to hear me ramble at you before here, but it doesn't happen often. As Matt was saying, I'm going to talk a little bit oh, there's me. My name is Margaret.

I'm in park operations. I will attempt to speak to a couple of the other, you know, make reference to things that parks planning does as they involve trees, but really mostly coming at it from the ops lens, which is where our natural resource resources management and urban forestry, maintaining Kent's trees operations live. I'm going start off talking a little bit about the real high level data before I get into park specifics. I know or at least I believe everybody has seen the King Conservation District Canopy assessment that was done in 2018 that was analyzing aerial imagery from 2017. And then there's been a lot of talk about the update that's coming.

So progress reports and also still more to come. About half of the cities that were in that initial assessment have been completed. We are one of them. We were one of the early ones. The ones in yellow there that I've circled are the ones who have been updated.

I realize those numbers are those are the old numbers next to the green bars. The yellow circles are the cities that have been updated and all of the cities that have been updated are within kind of a 1%, 2% change. Kent, as we look at the city overall is showing I think we moved from 28% to 29%, But one of the things as we look into that data more and bring it in house, we're lucky enough to have GIS professionals in parks and public works who will help us bring that in so we can analyze and nerd out about it as my team is probably sick of hearing me use. I love that phrase. A lot of the detail that will let us act on and kind of ask questions of this data and think about what it means is when you take that overall Canopy data and you slice it up into a more granular, like you're looking at this one is showing canopy change from 17 to 23 is sliced by census group.

You can do blocks. You can do watersheds. There's a lot of different ways you can slice that data up and look at the analysis. And then there are also, as I'll get into other levels of data that we track about tree canopy and there's also some other sources that are citywide canopy data using different protocols from different entities. Don't want to go too far down the data rabbit hole today, but just like there's a lot.

It's really cool, a lot of regional effort, and we're paying a lot of attention, and we're looking at getting these data sources in house and ingested. So now officially putting my parks cap back on. We have a lot of parks. We're lucky to have some really cool forested acreage, both standalone parks trees. When we talk about urban forestry, we mean the entire 1,200 plus acres that Parks manages.

Whereas about 800 of those acres are what we would call more of a natural area. And the big thing that gives us some grief, although it's cool because it means we're right up next to people, is those the length of edge that we manage. So if you think about a a forested stand right next to a house or a ball field, There's a lot of yay and a lot of, okay, if the trees are posing a risk to those other land uses, that's some extra management that's needed. Again, this is a very dense map. You'll be seeing a lot more of this.

I believe this is coming out in some of our updated kind of like what does our system look like, documents. There's a lot of different metrics there on the side. If anybody does want to know more about them, come ask us later. Really, what it amounts to is we manage a lot of different kinds of trees. So, when we're talking about parks trees, as Matt was saying, you've got the large forest stands, that's actually the canyon.

I love to point out, like, there's some really nice chunks in the canyon. We have newly planted trees at places like Saltair. We've got trees that, you know, like to have disagreements with infrastructure like sidewalks, although public works can speak to that way, way more. And then we have the hybrid, right? That's entrance to Clark Lake, where you've got big trees that we kind of call more of a standalone tree where we're managing more of like a lawn type area around them. There's also a lot of different strategic plans in parks that touch on trees. Again, really cool. Trees impact a lot of different core function workflows and also a much more complex conversation than today's topic where parks is sort of this is kind of a we'll be back with more information.

Yeah. Can you go back two slides please? Or the one that was the parks managed acreage.

Figure out the butt ends. This one?

One back. That one. Yeah. The numbers that are next to parks, are those just the numbers of parks? It's like small numbers on them. One and ten and forty two.

To be totally honest, this is a really cool base map that our parks GIS analyst is in the process of making for the updated, I think the facility guide. And so I think those numbers are probably tied towards the park name. Like I can see a little docking

that is where

campuses. So I think that's probably our list of parks properties. But those little teeny tiny numbers on the map, I really I kind of used I grabbed this as the base map to say we are all over the city. Look at the variety of the size of those green dots. We have parks that range from a tenth of an acre to a 150 acres. If there is something you're seeing on this map that we wanna, you know, zoom into and know more about, I can absolutely capture that today. But for now, this image was meant to be a

Oh, no worries.

There's a lot. Thank you. But yeah, believe that those numbers are, you know, that's this part.

Got it. Thank you. Okay.

Lots of trees touch on a lot of things. We're going to talk a lot about in the future and adjusting this canopy level data. Just want to make sure everybody also knows we track things to the more localized forested stand within our parks and in some cases we track standalone trees. Really the takeaway there is lots of different levels of data, granularity of data and some you have to think about what you want a data set to do, what questions you want to ask it and then that will guide it will be part of what guides what metrics we're tracking at each one of these scales. Again, more to come.

So we've got all our standalone tree data and TreeKeeper and we just completed more of a forested sand ecological monitoring scope. This for today is just awareness that we do have more of that kind of granular forested sand data about parks trees coming. Again, as Matt mentioned, think public works will hit on this too. Managing trees, maintaining trees, growing a forest does involve removing trees. Sometimes that's a risk management situation.

There's a whole assessment protocol if we have a tree of concern, particularly that's the maple adjacent to the playground at Saltair that was quite literally falling apart because of a root disease that our arborist could speak to way better if we were in that level of nerdiness. But this is really supposed capture, you know, we are also out there doing pretty high profile tree removal sometimes, and so we're navigating that with the public as well. We have some numbers here on the right about the number of hours we spent for staff time and then the dollar amounts we spent doing tree assessments and removals. So the top is staff hours. Big takeaways there are it seems like a lot of hours and also when you realize that it's spread out across 45 different people in our maintenance staff, we really we have our parks arborist, our urban forester, Jillian, and then everybody else is kind of varying levels of involved in trees.

We don't have 45 tree experts running around. That'd be amazing. We don't have a dedicated tree team. And then the big takeaway for the contracted costs, that was the one time bucket of money that you all might have remembered. Thank you. We appreciate it. Also, we did spend it all. So you'll be hearing, I'm sure, from us more on what risk management and mitigation looks like around there. And then it's just it's a the workload is hard to capture when it comes to these removals cause they really are a case by case situation. We get a lot of concerns from the public.

They don't all turn into a removal, but they are something to manage. People have big feelings about trees, both the loving them and the being concerned about what they'll do. But we do try to plant things too. So, Kent has been a Tree City USA for twenty three years that pulls in numbers from parks and public works and relies on us having some tree code. We do an Arbor Day proclamation and planting every year.

We have Green Kent events scattered around the city, some of which involve planting, some don't. Sometimes we get the chance to involve the community in that replanting process and sometimes it's our crews out there running around with planting bags and shovels back in the woods and nobody else see them, but we are out there doing it when we can. It tends to be opportunistic. It tends to be reliant on either grant funds or partner support. And there are some signs that some of that regional yeah, everybody's struggling to dedicate money towards these things.

And so if we are relying on grant funding, that's operational time to ask for it and can't count on those pots of money being there. There are also challenges beyond our control. So we don't exactly know what they are, but we know they're coming on a day to day basis and then more, you know, with best science, best available science looking forward. So some of it's our community members who clearly, I would like to think, don't understand and do vandalism to some of our trees. That's one of the pictures.

There's also emerging pests and pathogens and some potentially climate change associated species die back. So the the green circle is a western red cedar that's showing die back regionally for we don't even know all the reasons. So there we know things beyond our control are coming and there's ways that we can manage our forest and our trees to be more resilient, but there's still gonna be curveballs. I've been very lucky and thankful to formalize working with the other departments. We were doing it already a little bit, but having the work group really helps things just within the last six months, the critical areas ordinance update and how that relates to forested stands that are in critical areas.

MPDS permit is going to touch on all city owned and operated property as I'll touch on. And then just nerding out with the other like, best practices, the maintenance crews, the how are you doing it, how are you handling this? Like, I I think the internal arborist collaboration, you know, the nerding out means a lot. So I will hand it off to my fellow eco eco nerd. Sorry. I ramble too much, like always. Hi.

I'm Jennifer Harrell. I work in street vegetation in the public works operations department, and I'm gonna talk to you about what we do in public works operations as far as urban trees. Public works operations has several different crews involved in managing trees and contributing to the city's tree canopy. Each area has different goals and environmental factors to consider when making decisions about managing trees. The street tree program manages approximately 2,500 trees.

Street trees provide a lot of unique benefits including adding aesthetic appeal to the community, cooling urban areas, home traffic, and extending the life of pavement. Tasks such as pruning, cutting tree grates as trunks grow, and watering new trees need to be done regularly. Tree planting is a very important aspect of the street tree program, but maintenance after planting is the largest investment of time. Our street tree work is performed by the same crew that maintains traffic islands and other right of way areas. Side arm mower operators also help with tree maintenance in the winter when they're not mowing, and occasionally, we utilize contractors for large projects.

Street tree life cycle. Like some of the other people were saying, street trees in urban areas have a limited life expectancy. Life is tough in a treat pit, as you can see in that picture. They have limited growing space above ground and below. Access to water and nutrients is difficult in these small spaces, causing stress and increasing the chances of pests and diseases.

We do take measures to extend the life of our trees, but eventually, even a healthy street tree will outgrow its space and need to be removed and replaced. A couple of goals this year for our street tree program is to update our street tree inventory and our approved street tree list. We also have environmental restoration sites. The wetland mitigation crew manages 96 acres in various stages of restoration. The crew is made up of one full time employee and five limited hour temporary staff.

This crew plants thousands of native trees, shrubs, wildflowers, and grasses each year. Many of the plants are grown at the city's native plant nursery that this crew manages. Tree maintenance on these sites consists of watering new plants and controlling competing vegetation. Our wetland maintenance program. The wetland maintenance crew consists of one full time employee and one limited hour temporary.

They maintain a 174 sites around the city. That's a total of 877 acres. Most of the wetlands are in neighborhoods in close proximity to homes. Tree health and hazard abatement are priorities in these areas. Funding for the wetland maintenance program comes from the drainage fund. Oh, and if I could go back. Funding for environmental restoration sites come from the drainage fund and individual project funds. We get a lot of grant funding for these sites. Wellhead protection and spring sites. The water vegetation crew is made up of two full time employees and one seasonal temporary.

They manage the trees and other vegetation on all water facility sites, including 800 or 488 acres of wellhead and spring sites. These are large areas with heavy tree cover that contribute a lot to the city's total tree canopy cover. Funding for maintenance at the wellhead and spring sites come from the water fund. Any questions?

Councilor Michel.

Thank you, Council President. Thank you for this presentation. Where does the Street Tree funding come from?

It comes from the Street Fund. Okay. Thank you.

Looks like Laura is up. Thank you, Jennifer.

Hello, my name is Laura Herron. I'm the environmental water quality supervisor. And today, I'm here to talk to you about the NPDS permit, the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System. The city is required to obtain this permit in order to discharge water from our public system into waters of the state. And this is part of the clean water act that is a requirement of the environmental protective agency.

And in the state of Washington, the department of ecology oversees this permit. This requires the development of implementation of pollution prevention programs and policies. We are currently under the permit that is from started in 2024 and it will go until 2029. Along with this permit came many new programs and policies that we are required to implement and the tree canopy program is one of these permits. This has become one of the big drivers that started the urban forestry group so that we could all get together and see how we could work together to meet these permit requirements.

So the mandate is to implement green infrastructure as policy. Under NPDS, trees are formally now recognized as stormwater management assets, and the intent is to integrate this tree canopy policies into our stormwater planning. So by the deadline of 12/31/2026, we will need to map the tree canopy on permitting owned and operated properties, and that's what this really covers under the permit, is the permitting owned and operated properties. And we will need to identify tree canopy areas for stormwater management, and we are currently working on doing this. We're looking at Planet Geo.

And seeing if this might work for us, we're gonna be meeting with our GIS staff to see if this will really meet the requirements of the permit. There's a lot of good data out there, but we want to be very accurate and strategic about how we define our tree canopy because this has the potential to become a legal asset that is protected under our storm water system. So we want to make sure we're doing it correctly. And as you've learned throughout this presentation, trees benefit our community in many, many different ways. So we want to be strategic in how we make sure that we're also considering the needs of our overburdened communities and how trees are important to them as well, and how we can make sure that we're meeting their needs while implementing these plans and policies.

So by 12/31/2028, we will map the overburdened communities in relation to the Canopy permitted owned and operated properties. And then we'll establish goals to maintain or increase the tree canopy in overburdened communities.

Laura, I have a question. So when you're talking about mapping trees for both the map tree canopy and for the communities, are we going specifically just for the permits or is it going to be

It's for city owned and maintained property. So any properties that the city owns and maintains.

Okay. So it's not going to be a requirement for

No. This just covers our requirements as a city.

Okay. Thank you.

So our plan is by 12/31/2028, we will adopt and implement a tree our tree canopy goals and policies, and that includes establishing long term goals to maintain existing mature canopy and increasing as feasible. And we will create code, policy updates, and other enforceable documents to document and support these policies. Any questions?

Thank you for having me here today to talk about this. I am in fact Nate Schuldmeyer, Economic and Community Development. So the role that ECD plays in providing, maintaining tree canopy throughout the city, it's fundamentally pretty different than what you've just heard about from parks and public works. As they each described, those two departments are actively out there planting, cutting, maintaining spaces that are owned and operated by the city and they each did an excellent job going through all of those types of things, even overviewing it. It's a lot, you know, that they're up to out there.

But the role that ECD plays and the way that we contribute is different. At a really basic level, what we primarily do is review development plans and proposals in the form of permit applications. So in that way, the nature of our work is more reactive to just kind of what comes in the door for development and the work itself is regulatory. So we implement requirements for tree preservation and providing trees as private developments get approved and built consistent with the adopted development codes and the regulations and the laws that apply to those. The regulations related to trees that we deal with touch on a few key areas relative to trees and tree canopy and that dictate how trees end up on private sites after the development occurs.

So there are really about three categories of or buckets of regulations that these laws fall into. So I want to mention the first two of those somewhat briefly and then spend a little more time tonight at the end talking about the third bucket, which is the residential tree regulations that we have. So here on the screen, you can see Kent's critical areas. Pretty I'm familiar with that. That update has been going on for a year, year and a half, long time.

So on this slide, you see the representation of the known and mapped areas of the city where there are already those strict regulatory restrictions on almost any and all tree removals based on environmental sensitivity. These are the city's critical areas and shorelines combined all in one and together they constitute roughly about a third of the city's total land area. And I realize this is kind of a hard image to make sense of at this scale, on a citywide scale. It's just really meant to give you a taste of the amount of area that we're talking about, which is roughly about a third of the city's land area. So from a regulatory perspective, these are essentially no cut areas for existing trees based on being designated in some way shape or form as the area being designated as environmentally sensitive.

Unless a property owner might have something like a single hazardous tree or something that they need to address, they're not really allowed under the regulations to go and clear cut or cut down trees or disturb vegetation significantly in these areas. So the second category of regulatory requirements that we deal with that I really just briefly want to call your attention to is our general landscaping requirements. So these are requirements that are generally applicable to bigger ticket developments like commercial development, industrial, large multifamily sites and just anything that's a site that's developed on kind of on a larger scale. While there's absolutely some really good functional purposes to these regulations like for shading buildings and storm water management and low impact development and to provide buffers between properties to shield noise and light from the neighbors. These regulations are also for aesthetic purposes.

The trees being planted on these sites and arranged as they are, as you can kind of see here in these pictures, allows them to coexist with whatever the site is actually being developed for. And by developing by requiring that developers build some landscaping elements into their parking lots and around the buildings and around the edges of the site, like you kind of see here represented, in a way that balances the site's primary purpose with plantings that make the site attractive and user friendly. It just makes our cities places nicer to live in and to visit and to work in. So the third of our category of our regulations that ECD really deals with heavily, the one I want to spend a little extra time here with tonight is the set of regulations that apply to how residential developments do trees in residential areas and in

our

neighborhoods. So these are the regulations that are primarily responsible for how neighborhoods are either required to retain existing mature trees and or choose to plant new replacement trees closest in proximity to where people live and where that tree canopy can provide the greatest benefit to people in the community. The reason I'd like to spend a little extra time on this topic tonight is that with middle housing and our implementation measures through Recode Kent that are still going on and you guys are well aware of, traditional residential development patterns are changing and getting denser and so our residential tree regulations will need to adapt to respond to these changes. The way that green spaces and trees function in these residential areas shapes in a pretty fundamental way how people perceive the place they live in their neighborhood that they live in. So relative to the residential tree code regulations, can see it on the bottom half of the slide.

In 2024, King County did a pretty in-depth assessment of tree codes on a city by city basis throughout the county. You can see here the general grouping that we fell into the level three moderate, which their formula was essentially four tiers. It was like no regulations, good, better, best and we kind of came into that better category in that. So what we did when we got the results of that report and we saw it and went through it is that we went out and sought out other jurisdictions that were rated like us and at a higher level at Tier four under their rating system and use that input as a basis to start thinking about what we could potentially be doing better with our regulations. So those ratings were based on our current regulations and this slide here is just meant to give you kind of a taste of like what that looks like without going through all the nuts and bolts of it.

So our current code, as you can see described here is what that assessment that was done in the ratings that were provided by the county. So under the current code, planning staff typically does a review of a tree credit analysis for a plat during the preliminary review process and based on what the applicant proposes to either retain or plant, they have to meet the required standard that we have of 20 tree credits per acre. So tree credits are assigned for any retained existing trees by size. You can kind of see that in the demonstration there. And all qualifying newly planted trees essentially count as one credit.

So by the math, if a site is fully cleared to make way for a new subdivision, what the developer is doing is planting trees throughout the neighborhood at a ratio of 20 new trees planted per acre. On any undeveloped lots where there's an existing house located, the property owner can under today's rules remove any of their trees unless the trees are part of an already approved tree plan for a platter or short plat. And on any undeveloped lot with no house or established use or anything built on it, they're prohibited from removing any of the significant trees. And as it shows on the slide here at the bottom and just as a kind of a general reminder, anything within a wetland or on a steep slope or anything that's on a property that's under development that's in a critical area is also subject to those environmental restrictions that I mentioned in the first category. Yeah, sure.

So

I'm kind of just saying traditional in the sense pre middle housing like not unit lot subdivisions are coming in those types of things. So it's just kind of the way neighborhood development has been happening for a long time. So yes, there's no real definitive definition of traditional versus non traditional. It's just kind of development patterns in the past. So sure, yeah.

So this slide here gives a basic idea. Oh, I'm sorry. Forgot to switch my talking points. So over the last two years, since that report came out, Lindsay Walker and my staff and I have have conducted well over 20 interviews with other cities and jurisdictions to gather information and feedback and to dive into not just the language of their codes that each each of these cities has on the books, which is what that rating that the county assigned was based on. But to also dig into what's working, what's not working about the way their codes are written.

So we can kind of really get a view behind the scenes of like how do they work, know, not just what the language says. So we asked a bunch of questions, we spent time with all of these jurisdictions and a lot of others and we just asked them like, what's working or not working about the way things are written? What kind of review processes and administrative resources does your tree code require? Do people in the city or town like these regulations and feel good about them or is it something that they're always upset about and you're always having a fight with them? What we were able to do through that effort was gather some really great feedback through the interviews and a few common themes and issues that they kind of all faced and dealt with in different ways emerged.

So for the purposes of generalizing those overview, the themes and issues, they basically boil down to those four items that are on the bottom of the slide. So the first of those is how we strike the right balance relative to like a natural tension that exists between a strategy that mandates or incentivizes retention of existing trees versus mandating or incentivizing replanting requirements. So how a jurisdiction decides to strike that balance is really critical. This is something that from everything we heard from other places takes some really careful and intentional strategizing in order to balance the priorities for things like infill development, increased density that allows for greater home ownership opportunities and middle housing generally. The second of those is how we choose to qualify and regulate hazardous trees and conditions.

A tree that's damaged in a storm, great example being the the bomb cyclone event that happened about a year or two ago, where overnight, you know, we've got thousands of new hazardous trees around the city that have to be dealt with. And so when that tree is threatening to fall on someone's house, it might not allow time for lengthy approval processes to take place or for the person to hire an arborist to write an assessment that they can show to us and then we can green light them to do something. So how do we balance tree protection with protection for people's homes and properties is another big one. Third is the administrative processes and costs and this is a really important consideration from both the perspective of the city but also for the individual property owners. What are we requiring of them?

How much of the city is limited as you're all very well aware resources? Are we willing to commit in terms of staff time and for permit processing and reviews and for enforcement activities? All of those costs time and money for the city. And how much of a property owners limited resources are we asking for them to commit to tree protection, maintenance and replacement? Are we creating a process and a cost burden that incentivizes compliance with the requirements or are we creating a process and a cost burden for both the city and for the property owner that incentivizes non compliance?

And the last of the overarching themes, the clearly stated goals are a real key. So if we can articulate clearly what we want to achieve with the code and the regulations, the way that we kind of restructure things and what we and say what we want to have happen as we consider revisions, then we'll be able to measure our progress towards whatever our goals are. So in that spirit, we've come up with a few broad stroke type things to consider as we look at making some changes to our existing residential tree codes. On the screen here, can see five bullets where staff have taken all that input that we've heard and identified a few thing key things that I think we need to consider as we kind of approach some changes. The first is that we make some text revisions to our code the way it's written right now and stated intent in the tree preservation code section.

That sections especially helpful when having to make interpretations and in the administration of the code generally. And then also adding a new code section within the residential tree code regulations that focuses on enforcement provisions that would be an opportunity to establish really some kind of nuanced and right sized procedures to deal specifically with trees that are separate and distinct from our general code enforcement regulations that are in a different chapter. So another one of these bullets up here is that in terms of how our code requirements apply to middle housing, how we might modify the existing credit formula that's the basis of our current regulation. The main objective for change here would be to make tree requirements more compatible with and applicable to the variety of middle housing options that are now out there and available to people when they're doing development. We'd like to think about some practical and productive ways that we could change and tweak and apply our credit formula differently in order to get more of the trees and tree canopy that we want as a result.

And so really the basic question, you can see it represented in the graphic here, is how do we fit more stuff in the form of housing units, utilities, parking areas, stuff like that like you can see in these demonstration site plans on the right onto smaller and smaller sites and how we right size the requirements for tree regulations to fit into the, you know, to fit either retained or newly planted trees into those types of scenarios. And how do we adjust the math behind how our credits are calculated in an appropriate way that supports our tree goals that we have? And the final point I'd like to make here is that we have to be also really realistic and intentional in terms of both the time and money we want to invest in our tree codes. If we're going to dial up the staff's workload with new administration and enforcement, our own costs are going to increase. And if we're going to dial up the costs on the applicant side to have them pay for things like arborist and or costly permit review application fees?

How much are we expecting a homeowner or developer to realistically pay? Cost and timing are just elements that we just need to have a balance for and a clear idea of what's entailed for these. So on the screen here, these are a couple of just key takeaways that I'd like to leave you with related to how our residential tree codes might be ripe for some updates. Residential development patterns are changing with the variety of changes brought on by middle housing and our implementation measures that we're going through with Recode Kent. And our tree codes just really need to update and change and adapt alongside in order to effectively respond.

So the next steps for Lindsay on my staff and I is that what we'd like to do, we have the consent of the council to do is to come back in about three months, we're targeting like June to really bring some proposals relative to the language of the code section that deals with tree preservation for residential development and start having some conversations with you guys in order to try to figure out what direction we want to go and how much we're willing to dial things up or adjust things, change the math on our formula, those types of things. And in the meantime, we're also going to continue having some conversations with other jurisdictions where we've heard some things that we're interested in, think might work well for us and be able to bring all that information to you. Like I said, our target is in approximately June to come in and start having some more of that conversation, detail focus on this section. So that's it for the presentation. And I think we're all here.

Do you have any other questions for anyone else or for myself?

You, Nate. Thank you, Margaret, Jennifer, Laura and Matt for this presentation. I have a couple of questions and I think Council Member Boyce does as well. So my first one is about the group. How often are you all planning on meeting or what do you think the sort of the goal will be or outcome?

Well, would say we're meeting as needed. Our focus since August has been on putting this presentation together to kind of give you this overview. And I think as we move into first the development regulations update, we'll make sure that as we prepare recommendations for the council that we'll have those internally vetted to see if there are any conflicts and if they could be if they're as good as they can be. So it's kind of a it's an ad hoc or as needed group. So

I think it's a great group, getting everyone together. Okay. Councilmember Boyce followed by Councilor Michaud.

Thank you. Madam President, great presentation. You know, people there's a lot of things that make a city go, but who would think about urban forestry management as part of what make the city a city, right? So I just want to I know we have three gentlemen who didn't get to speak, so maybe just give them time to kind of be part of the team, I'm assuming, right? So give them a chance maybe to stand up and introduce yourself if you don't mind, please.

And Jillian too.

On up and

Come up, please. Yeah. You guys part of the team. You deserve your due. Good evening.

My name is Bryce Morellis. I am the street vegetation lead for public works operations. One of my jobs is to help manage the street tree program as well as remove hazard trees throughout the city, direct my crew to do prunings and plantings throughout the city amongst managing irrigation systems, managing landscape contracts, managing the general maintenance of planted beds throughout the city, and managing my crew as a whole as people.

Thanks for all you do. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Hey. Next.

Good afternoon. I'm Scott Schroeder. I've been with the city a long time. Been in this a long time. I I really am proud of these guys for doing this presentation. This is something that's been a long time coming. I know a big part of our job, and we were the ones that were involved with this the bomb cyclone. We did a lot of tree work. I'm the I'm the supervisor for street vegetation. When we went through that particular event, we were dealing with trees. I was dealing with trees on the phone with police and everyone else involved. I literally got a phone call, and I looked back at my call log. Every 30 to two minutes, I got a phone call about a tree down. So we had crews out, filming that. It was pretty intense.

Like I said, it was one of those things where being that I've been here since eighty five and a half, seeing the city grow from this big to this big and with that happening and development happening and everything else in the city growing, it's it's really cool to see there'd be the opportunity to get a group together like this to where you can actually bring things up to especially with dealing with city code and stuff like that, update those codes and bring those to where they're very efficient for what we do. I know myself, Jennifer, and Bryce, we spend a lot of time in the field talking to citizens, and it's it's good when we have that city code and city backing from council and everything else that when we go out there, we're giving, you know, correct information to the public. And it is it's time to update that change some of those things because as the city changes, we need to change with it to be able to address those issues for our community. So but no, thank you guys for what you do.

Hey, I just remember I'm you came to my house, right? I did. The tree behind my house. Just remember that. Thank you very much as well. Okay.

You're welcome. Thank you. Yep.

Alright.

Good evening. My name is Logan Wilkinson. I'm a maintenance worker too under Scott with Bryce and Jen also. And so I've only been with the city for two and a half years. I was actually watching videos on YouTube of tree climbers and arborists.

Mhmm.

And I talked to a buddy who said, hey, apply at the city. He he works here at Kent also. And then all three of them are arborists. So I've just always thought that stuff was awesome, and I've got to do I've got help with quite a bit of tree jobs and planting and pruning jobs. We got to do a bucket truck job today, do some pruning with trees. It's just fun stuff. I love doing it, I'm just happy to be here. And I heard they were coming out here tonight and I just wanted to see what it was about, come support and be here.

So the best decision you ever made is come work for the city of Kent.

That's awesome. Yeah.

Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. I have one more.

I'm Jillian Lawrence. I am the Parks Urban Forester. I work a lot with Margaret, taking care of our Parks trees, handling trees of concern, citizen concerns. And lately, we've been able to get out there and plant a whole bunch of seedlings from the DNR. Happy to see those grow up and really excited to be working with this urban forestry group across the the city. Done some chatting back and forth between different departments and it's nice to have everyone in the same room and able to nerd out about tree things.

So thank you. So Matt will not be a good leader without people like you guys. So thank you very much for all you do. How about a nice hand for them?

I thought they didn't want to say anything, but can I as privilege, just point out, I wanna recognize that group and say to Chad Baron and Julie Perez Gondola, who in the room tonight, the directors of those two departments? Thank you for allowing these folks to be part of the group. They've been extremely professional, very knowledgeable, and have just worked really hard to bring this together. So thank you for the time tonight and thank you to the group.

Thank you, guys.

Councilor Rucheau.

I just want to say thank you to all the staff as well. I know you've spent a lot of time on this for years, and we had some conversations lately, a lot more about them. So I appreciate your time. I do think that the development regulations are a good place to start, so I'm looking forward to that presentation later this year. Thank you.

Thank you.

Councilor Malarber?

Your mic's on. Yeah, I want also just thank you guys and tell you I'm a little bit jealous. Being able to like nerd out on trees frequently is awesome. So I really appreciate your guys' enthusiasm and all you're doing for our beautiful giants throughout the community. So it means a lot to me personally just to take care of what we have in our urban forests. Thank you very much.

Any other comments? All right. Thank you so much, Matt. Thank you so much, team, for this presentation.

Want to shout out Lindsey Walker who's not here tonight. She's also a very instrumental part of helping me prepare for this, helping me with these interviews that we conducted like over the course of years setting those up. She just had other stuff she had to attend to tonight. So I had to do the speaking otherwise I'd let her do that. But you guys have seen her with the critical areas ordinance.

Absolutely, we have.

She's fabulous.

All right. Thank you so much and looking forward to future presentations and shout out to Lindsay Walker. We'll see her next time. All right. Thank you, everyone. Have a good night.