· The Department of Public Works' Bureau of Urban Forestry manages City-owned street trees. Of an estimated 106,000 street trees in the public right of way, the Bureau of Urban Forestry manages approximately 30,000. The remaining trees are maintained by private property owners.

· The Department of Public Works' tracking, reporting and monitoring of street trees and maintenance is inadequate to manage tree planting and maintenance efficiently. The Department is unable to provide consistent and complete data on the number of street trees and schedule of maintenance.

· Accurate street tree information, including tree location, condition, and maintenance history is especially important as the City moves forward with its goal is to plant an additional 5,000 trees each year. The Department of Public Works will need accurate information to efficiently allocate staff resources to planting and maintaining trees.

· The Department of Public Works could do much more to increase tree and landscape maintenance productivity. The Department needs to establish performance goals and measures and enhance the productivity of its existing staff. For example, the Department needs to develop procedures to prioritize and coordinate routine maintenance with service requests. The Department also needs to better manage staff performance, attendance, and productivity.

· The Department's ability to plant and maintain new street trees will impact the presence of street trees throughout the City. Currently, street trees are not distributed equitably among neighborhoods. Property owners incur costs to maintain street trees, resulting in inequality in the status of the urban forest based on variation in economic development across the City's neighborhoods.

· The Department does not adequately monitor street trees that are removed illegally or enforce citations and fines for doing so. The Department has not collected approximately $60,000 in fines. Nor does the Department follow up on tree removal permits that have been denied to ensure that the tree was not removed illegally.

San Francisco's urban forest has been the focus of increased attention in recent years due to a heightened Citywide focus on greening initiatives. There are a number of City departments, programs, committees, and councils working on issues related to the urban forest. However the Department's Bureau of Urban Forestry is the lead entity in the care of trees in the public right of way.

The term "urban forest" actually encompasses more than those trees the Bureau of Urban Forestry has jurisdiction over, including trees in parks and on private property. According to one recent estimate, the City has approximately 106,000 street trees in the public right of way, approximately 30,000 of which are trees maintained by the Department. The remaining 76,000 or so street trees are maintained by private property owners. The forestry unit within the Bureau maintains and prunes these approximately 1/3 of the City's street trees, processes all permits for street tree planting and removal, and performs inspection for tree maintenance and sidewalk repair needs.

In addition, the Bureau has a landscape unit that is in charge of maintaining over 200 acres of landscaped medians, other right of way locations, and civic plazas, as well as provides services to other agencies through interdepartmental work orders. The Bureau also has a sidewalk division which repairs sidewalks lifted by tree roots of Department-maintained street trees, as well as provides services to other agencies through interdepartmental work orders.

State of the Urban Forest

There have been a number of efforts in the past several years to assess the state of the urban forest and make recommendations for its upkeep and expansion, including an Urban Forest Plan published by the Urban Forestry Council in February of 2006. This plan, although addressing a scope larger than that of the Department's street tree work, found significant maintenance and planting deficiencies in the urban forest. It concluded that there are over 127,000 empty planting sites in the City, and only sixty percent of existing street trees can be considered in "good" condition.

The report also found that street trees are not distributed equitably among neighborhoods. Aggravating this is the cost burden for property owners to maintain street trees, resulting in more inequality in the status of the urban forest based on variation in economic development across the City's neighborhoods.

Citywide Street Tree Inventory

Section 805 Article 16 of the Public Works Code (the Urban Forestry Ordinance) states that "the Department shall use its best efforts to maintain an inventory of all trees or corridors of trees under its jurisdiction." All trees in the public right of way, and therefore all street trees in the City (both department-maintained and privately-maintained) fall under the jurisdiction of the Department.

However, the Department does not keep such an inventory of all street trees. It has a database of the approximately 30,000 trees it maintains. It also maintains records of all privately-maintained street trees for which the City has issued a planting permit since the 1920s, totaling approximately 49,000 permits. Of course, many of the trees for which these permits were issued in the past have been long-since deceased or replaced. The City does not keep detailed information on these trees, other than general data, such as the species.

Because there are an estimated 106,000 street trees in the City and the Department's database includes only the maintenance records of the 30,000 street trees under its care, full records are kept for only 28.3 percent of all street trees. Without a full street tree inventory, the Department is missing out on valuable opportunities to improve the quality and size of the urban forest Citywide. For example, without such information, the Department cannot identify the number and locations of non-Department maintained empty basins and other potential sidewalk sites where trees could be planted. Such information could be useful in an education campaign to property owners encouraging them to plant trees where currently none exist. Some estimates put the number of empty planting sites at over 127,500, meaning the potential to double the size of the street tree population.

The Department states that such an inventory of non-Department maintained trees and basins would be cost-prohibitive. However, the Department could utilize volunteers and partnerships with nonprofit organizations, to begin building such an inventory. The city of Washington, D.C. uses college students to perform such an effort. The city of New York inventories its tree population every five years. The Department states that it is in discussions with partners to potentially undertake such an inventory effort with the use of an online mapping tool. This effort should be continued, and in coordination with other City agencies like the Department of the Environment, the Urban Forestry Council, volunteers, and community groups.

Measuring Performance

Controller's Performance Measures

The Department does not have any measures related to the Bureau of Urban Forestry included the Controller's performance measures, which are reported annually by every City department. The Bureau should be included in such reporting. Some potential performance measures would be the number of trees planted per year, the mortality rate of new trees, the average length of time between tree prunings and landscape maintenance, the number of different types of permits issued, and the number of illegal tree removal citations issued.

Forestry Division

Further, Proposition C, which was approved by the voters in 2003, establishing Charter Section F.102, mandated the publishing of and reporting against maintenance schedules for streets, sidewalks, parks and park facilities. Although Proposition C does not require the Department to publish maintenance schedules for tree maintenance, the Department does publish a pruning schedule on its website.

However, this published pruning schedule is the Bureau of Urban Forestry's goal for pruning street trees and does not reflect the actual maintenance schedule. The average number of years between prunings for a department-maintained tree is seven years, compared to a goal of three years. The Department prunes some trees with far higher frequency, however. These include California, Folsom and Pine Streets, which receive pruning maintenance at least once every two years. In addition, the Department does not report its performance in pruning individual trees, as would be required by Proposition C for other types of park and street maintenance schedules. The Department can estimate the average number of years between prunings by calculating the number of trees it maintains per year, but it does not have an overall picture of the actual pruning schedule of its street trees.

As previously mentioned, the Bureau of Urban Forestry keeps a database of all trees it maintains. The database, although recently redesigned, has several inadequacies that limit the ability of the Department to efficiently perform its work. The database cannot generate important reports that would help it develop a work plan and allocate resources efficiently, such as a report listing the number of trees which haven't been pruned in a given number of years. Given that the Bureau of Urban Forestry prunes its street trees approximately every seven years on average, with some street trees pruned as seldom as every 15 years, tracking and monitoring street trees that have the greatest potential need for pruning would allow the Bureau to prioritize staff time and resources.

Using its existing database, the Department also cannot track the survival rate of newly planted trees, thereby missing potentially valuable information about patterns in tree mortality and need to reallocate resources or re-think planting strategies and young tree-maintenance. The database also is not currently able to "talk" with the Department's 28-Clean service request system. The Department should work with its information technology staff to improve its databases, and the integration of the forestry databases with 28-Clean.

Landscape Division

Similarly, the landscape division within the Bureau of Urban Forestry has significant deferred maintenance issues on the medians and other public lands it maintains. Unlike the Recreation and Park Department, the Bureau of Urban Forestry's landscape division does not have a similar Proposition C mandate to publish a schedule of median and other landscape work to be performed at a given site, or the standards to which these sites should be held. The Department should develop such schedules and standards, even though not required by Proposition C.

However, even if such schedules currently existed, the Bureau would not be able to determine if it is complying with the schedule. The Department does not keep records of its routine maintenance on its landscape properties. The only record of work done is through closed-out service requests generated by 28-Clean, which often take precedence over routine maintenance needs. The Bureau of Urban Forestry should develop methods for tracking all of the routine and non-routine work done on landscape properties in order to best allocate resources in the future.

Permits and Fees

In-Lieu Fee

The Department charges an "in-lieu" fee, deposited into the Adopt-A-Tree Fund, for destroying or removing a tree in the public right of way or for not planting a tree where otherwise required by Planning Code Section 143(d). The Urban Forestry Ordinance states that the in-lieu fee is to be equal to the replacement value of the tree removed, destroyed, or excused. Prior to FY 2006-2007, the in-lieu fee was last set in 1996 at $560. The Department revised the in-lieu fee in FY 2006-2007, raising it to a minimum of $1,489. The Department is to review adjusting the fee annually in accordance with the procedures set forth in Public Works Code Section 2.1.2.

Although the Department revised its in-lieu for FY 2006-2007 to recover costs, the Department had not revised the in-lieu fee for the previous ten years, resulting in the fee revenues falling far short of the replacement value of the trees destroyed, removed or excused. The Department needs to ensure that it is assessing and updating all of its fees, including the in-lieu fee and new sidewalk landscape application permit fees, in every fiscal year going forward.

Tree Planting Permit Fee

Under the Public Works Code, a property owner does not pay a fee for planting a tree on the sidewalk fronting the property. The following Table 3.1 shows the number of permits applications submitted by developers and private individuals for the last three fiscal years.

Table 3.1

Tree Planting Permit Applications, FY 2003-2004 to FY 2005-2006

Source: Bureau of Urban Forestry Permit Log

As shown in Table 3.1, over half of all planting permit applications made during the past three fiscal years were filed on behalf of housing developers. The Department should adopt a tree planting permit application fee schedule in which those more capable of paying, such as developers, are charged the full administrative costs of processing planting permit applications, and others continue to pay a subsidized rate. One method of achieving this would be to apply a tree planting permit fee when property owners are required to plant new street trees in accordance with Section 143 of the Planning Code, which applies to both individuals and developers when building permits are issued for new construction or significant site modifications, thereby signaling the ability to pay for a permit.

Enforcement of Citations for Removal or Damage

The Department is not proactive in issuing citations to property owners for damaging or removing street trees, as is required by the Urban Forestry Ordinance. Such oversight results in an unchecked decline in the size of the urban forest, as well as a missed opportunity for Department revenues for the planting and maintenance of new street trees.

In FY 2005-2006, the Department sent 103 fine letters for illegal tree removal or pruning. The Department states that approximately 65 percent of cases that are eventually followed up upon result from citizen complaints. The investigating of street tree violations and the issuing of citations are low on the priority list for the Bureau of Urban Forestry, in part because the Department-maintained trees are on a significant deferred maintenance cycle. This is aggravated by the fact that the Department must respond to significant seasonal increases in work load due to weather conditions.

In order to perform more inspections without significantly increasing the burden on existing staff and resources, the Department should investigate better ways of including tree inspections in routine activities. Some potential methods to do this may include developing a simplified reporting and documentation system that allows maintenance workers and others in the entire Department to report street tree problems when they see them, without significantly adding to their work load. The Department should also train its staff to understand regulations related to street trees and train them to look at the City's streets and public rights-of-way holistically, not just their individual work assignments.

Collection of Fines Levied

In addition to the low number of citations issued, the Department does not adequately follow through and collect the fines it imposes. When an illegal removal or pruning is brought to the attention of the Department and the Department deems that a citation is in order, the Department creates an entry in its citation log and then tracks the progress of the citation issuance, appeals, and payment. This log shows that there were eleven violations in the past year for which citation letters were drafted but not sent, totaling potential lost revenues of $4,480.

Further, as of August 2006, the Budget Analyst has calculated that the Department collected only $13,740 in fines out of $109,364 for 103 citation letters sent during FY 2005-2006. $36,120 of the remaining uncollected $95,624 represents fines that have been waived or are pending through administrative review. Therefore, $59,504 in fines is unaccounted for, representing the amount not collected, waived, or pending administrative review. This lost revenue, if coupled with increased efforts to cite street tree violations, could result in significant additional revenues in the Adopt-A-Tree Fund, and therefore eventually more new trees planted. Further, these calculations of lost revenues are based upon a log with many incomplete records, pointing to a further need for the Department to improve its tracking and record-keeping of citations issued.

The actual benefits of issuing citations for illegal street tree removal and damage go beyond the citation revenues realized, although the benefits are not straightforward to calculate in dollar amounts. Department staff state that one of the primary ways they currently educate the public about street tree regulations is through the citation and hearing process. Many property owners are simply unaware of their legal obligations in relation to street trees, and if the Department were more proactive in issuing citations, then greater educational benefits would accrue as well, and the city's street tree population as a whole would potentially have more knowledgeable advocates and guardians among residents.

Denied Tree Removal Permits

The Department does not do a good job of finding and following through on the illegal removal of trees. The Department does not routinely revisit sites where permits for removal have been denied to verify that the tree is in fact still there. Anecdotal evidence indicates that trees for which removal permits have been denied are sometimes removed anyway.

According to the Bureau of Urban Forestry, current staffing levels do not allow such follow-up visits in all cases. However, the Department should make it a policy to revisit sites where removal permits have been denied after several months following the issuance of the permit denial letter. Departmental tree crews, landscape crews, watering crews, or even Bureau of Street Environmental Services crews could be utilized to perform such a brief check when in the vicinity of the denied permit location. The Department should create streamlined procedures for its various crews already working throughout the city to follow up on denied removal permits. These crews could perform these simple checks for the presence or absence of a tree that do not require the expertise of arborist inspectors.

Current City Tree Planting Efforts

The Department plays a central role in the City's recent "Clean and Green Initiative," part of which includes a promise to plant an additional 5,000 trees every year for the next five years. This 5,000 goal includes trees that are not trees in the public rights-of-way, however the Department has the most visible and significant planting role of all city departments. In FY 2006-2007, the Department received four new positions to establish trees that were newly-planted in FY 2005-2006. Additionally, the Department has engaged a contractor to plant and establish 2,400 new trees in FY 2006-2007.

The Department of Public Works needs to work with the Mayor's Office in planning tree planting and maintenance in future years. Currently, the Department, is only pruning its trees on an average cycle of seven years. The Department will need to coordinate maintenance resources with the planting of new trees. The Department should ensure that these growing maintenance costs are acknowledged and adequately addressed in its long-term budget planning for the Bureau of Urban Forestry.

Productivity and the Allocation of Resources

Prioritizing the Allocation of Resources

One of the primary challenges of the Department of Public Works is the utilization of its resources to regularly maintain the urban forest and the landscape areas under its jurisdiction while having the flexibility to respond to service requests of an unforeseen or immediate nature. Many service requests are called in by the public and by Department staff through the 28-Clean tracking system. Others are made by Department management and supervisors. Although all of these requests may be valid, it is unclear how the decision is made which to attend to first, and how these requests are balanced alongside the importance of routine maintenance.

The Department of Public Works does not have a formal way to prioritize among these competing immediate service requests and ongoing maintenance needs, other than the discretion of the Bureau of Urban Forestry Superintendent and supervisors. Inevitably, ongoing maintenance needs will suffer if the Department of Public Works does not identify and manage unnecessary service requests, placing the requests in the appropriate queue. The Department should develop a methodology for prioritizing these service needs.

Staff Productivity Standards

The Department does not utilize productivity standards for its landscape and tree crews, and cannot therefore evaluate the performance of it staff against such standards, develop annual work plans and deploy resources most efficiently. In 2002, such a staffing analysis was done for the landscape division in order to determine appropriate full-time equivalent position levels based on the amount of time needed to maintain properties, but this staffing analysis has not been updated since.

As previously mentioned, the Department does not keep records of routine maintenance performed on its landscape properties. The only record of work done on the landscaped public right of way is through closed-out service requests generated by 28-Clean, and these often take precedence over routine maintenance needs. Without such information, an analysis of the most efficient deployment of staffing resources is challenging.

To address the dual purpose of determining the actual staffing needs for routine maintenance, and the backlog of landscape maintenance, the Department should assess staffing alternatives, including dedicating one of its landscape crews to only routine maintenance, and allow other staff to respond to service requests. Such a re-organization would also allow the maintenance crew to keep records of maintenance performed, which as described above, is not currently done.

Staff Productivity and Absenteeism

Interviews with supervisors indicate that employee productivity is and quality of work are issues of concern to the Bureau. Further, in field visits with crews, it was observed that productivity was frequently lost due to absent staff. Crews in zones with missing personnel required supervisor oversight, trucks and equipment from other areas, which had to be re-routed or re-organized from their scheduled crews, resulting in productivity losses. Supervisors frequently noted that high rates of absenteeism impacted crew productivity.

Attendance data support these observations in the field. Of all bureaus in the Department, the Bureau of Urban Forestry has one of the highest rates of scheduled hours not worked. In the 12 pay periods between December 18, 2004 through December 16, 2005, Bureau of Urban Forestry staff worked 148,965 of their scheduled 192,195 hours, or 77.5 percent. 14,335 hours, or 7.4 percent of scheduled hours, were taken in sick leave (paid and unpaid). 9,270 hours, or 4.8 percent of scheduled hours, were taken in disability leave (paid and unpaid). The Bureau should work with the Department's human resources staff to review and evaluate existing protocols to monitor employees who are absent from work on extended sick or other types of leave. These efforts should include the identification of improvements in procedures to return employees to work through temporary transitional work assignments or American with Disabilities Act accommodations.

Conclusion

The Bureau of Urban Forestry is unable to keep pace with the maintenance and pruning of the City's street trees. The City's goal is to plant an additional 5,000 trees each year but the Bureau of Urban Forestry lacks resources to maintain current trees at an optimal level. The Department of Public Works' tracking, reporting and monitoring of street trees and maintenance is inadequate to manage tree planting and maintenance efficiently. The Department is unable to provide consistent and complete data on the number of street trees and schedule of maintenance. The Department needs to develop its tracking and reporting systems to more efficiently manage existing and new trees.

At the same time, the Department of Public Works should evaluate its current staffing resources and productivity. Because the planting of new trees requires new maintenance resources, the Department needs to employ its current resources more effectively. The Department should evaluate assignments, training, and staff performance to ensure that existing staff can provide tree maintenance at optimal levels.

Recommendations

The Director of Public Works should:

3.1 Submit a tree planting permit application fee schedule to the Board of Supervisors for approval that sets a fee schedule charging full permit processing costs to property owners that are required to plant new street trees in accordance with Section 143 of the Planning Code.

3.2 Work with the Mayor's Office and Board of Supervisors to align proposed planting of new trees with ongoing funding for maintenance of street trees.

The Deputy Director for Operations should:

3.3 Develop performance measures specific to the mission, goals, and objectives of the Bureau of Urban Forestry.

3.4 Develop a work plan and schedule to evaluate, identify, and implement improvements to the Bureau of Urban Forestry's databases, including assessing the feasibility and potential costs of integrating the forestry databases with 28-Clean, in conjunction with the Director of Finance and Administration.

The Bureau of Urban Forestry Manager should:

3.5 Develop an annual work plan and schedule to inventory non-Department maintained street trees, including setting inventory priorities based on geographical location and responsibility for trees.

3.6 Develop a volunteer program or partnership with nonprofit organizations to assist in the inventory of non-Department maintained street trees.

3.7 Report the actual pruning and tree maintenance schedule on the City's web site.

3.8 Develop median and other landscape maintenance standards and schedules and publish these standards and schedules on the City's web site.

3.9 Develop methods for tracking all of the routine and non-routine work done on landscape properties in order to best allocate resources in the future.

3.10 Evaluate procedures to include street tree inspections in routine activities, including streamlining reporting and documentation procedures and training staff in street tree regulations and procedures.

3.11 Develop procedures to revisit sites where removal permits have been denied, including (a) utilizing Bureau of Urban Forestry tree, landscape, and watering crews or Bureau of Street Environmental Services crews to conduct preliminary checks while performing other work in the vicinity, and (b) streamlining procedures and documentation.

3.12 Develop a methodology for prioritizing routine tree maintenance and service requests.

3.13 Assess staffing alternatives, including dedicating one of its landscape crews to only routine maintenance, and allow other staff to respond to service requests.

3.14 Work with the Human Resources and the Health and Safety Division to identify causes of paid and unpaid sick and disability leave and actions that the Bureau can take to reduce the incidence of unpaid leave and increase the number of productive hours.

The Director of Finance and Administration should:

3.15 Review and track fee revenues against expenditures each year to ensure that the Bureau of Urban Forestry is recovering service costs overall and recommend fee increases, in addition to the Consumer Price Index increases, to the Board of Supervisors as necessary.

3.16 Develop procedures to ensure timely collection of fines.

Costs and Benefits

By charging develops and businesses street tree planting permit fees, comparable to the existing minor sidewalk encroachment permit fees, the Department of Public Works would realize approximately $120,000 in additional fee revenues. Additionally, the Department would realized $60,000 in fine revenues through collection of existing citation fines. The Department could realize additional but not quantified fine revenues through increased enforcement activity.