Ahead of Earth Day, the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners has approved a resolution to work with Miami-Dade County Public Schools as one of many approaches to achieving a long-standing goal of increasing tree canopy in the county to 30%.
The county will provide M-DCPS with 50% of the cost, or up to $200,000, for tree acquisition, planting and maintenance on properties owned by the school district for the first year and revisit funding for subsequent years. Both entities will create maintenance plans, which include school site selection for the trees and estimation of costs associated with watering, mulching, fertilizing, pest control, and disaster preparation and recovery.
M-DCPS will establish training and support for staff, create opportunities for students, parents and community members to get involved in the tree planting process, and also track its progress through annual reports.
(FLUMC.org)
Rev. Ana Jackson, PACT Team Leader
The partnership came at the request of People Acting in Community Together (PACT), an interfaith coalition working toward social justice, during its annual Nehemiah action assembly, where more than 1,500 parishioners convened.
“We must ramp up our efforts to keep our neighborhoods cool and shady, and to protect our communities from extreme heat that affects some of our most vulnerable residents,” said Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, who had the resolution added to last Tuesday’s county commission meeting agenda, in a statement.
According to county officials, the timeline to reach 30% was originally set for 2020, but with setbacks caused by a variety of factors, including hurricanes and development, the time frame was extended to 2032.
A 2021 Urban Tree Canopy Assessment Report showed that the overall tree canopy within the county’s urban development boundary line was at 20.1%, showing no significant changes from a 2016 report.
PACT, seeking to accelerate the timeline, pressed county leaders to increase tree canopy levels in 15 neighborhoods identified as having less than 20% tree canopy levels and poverty rates between 21-41%.
Those neighborhoods are Brownsville, Bunche Park, Carol City, Gladesview, Goulds, Hialeah, Lake Lucerne, Naranja, Norland, Opa-locka, Pinewood, Scott Lake, West Little River, West Perrine and Westview.
“In our Extreme Heat Vulnerability Analysis, we found that there’s a very high correlation between ZIP codes with a high number of emergency room visits and those same ZIP codes having comparatively much higher land surface temperatures,” Jane Gilbert, the county’s chief heat officer, told The Miami Times. “One of the contributing factors to heat-related illness is the fact that it’s an Urban Heat Island (an area with warmer temperatures than nearby rural areas) and it’s lacking tree canopy.”
And with the county seeing an average of 51 more days of temperatures above 90 degrees than it did five decades ago, the coalition called for the two largest landowners in the county to partner up as a crucial first step in moving closer toward the 30% goal.
“A lot of the land in the county is in private hands, so we absolutely need people like homeowners to step forward and agree to plant trees on their properties,” explained H. Leigh Toney, PACT’s communications officer. “We targeted the county and school system because they are the largest and second-largest public land owners, so we want to utilize those public places.”
(Miamidade.gov)
Miami-Dade County’s Street Tree Master Plan set a goal to reach 30% tree canopy by 2020.
“Trees provide huge cooling benefits, not only because of the shade, but they also provide evaporation transportation,” said Gilbert. “And assist with stormwater management and habitat provision, and contribute to the general quality of life in a community and the overall aesthetics. It’s very important for us to address this inequity of tree canopy in our county.”
Kicking off the memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the county and M-DCPS, PACT and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority is a tree planting event at Miami Northwestern Senior High School Saturday, April 22, Earth Day.
More funding needed
“The county and school system agreed to share the cost of planting the trees and maintenance,” said Rev. Ana Jackson, pastor at Sellers Memorial UMC and a PACT team leader. “But $200,000 of course is not going to cover all of that, but since they committed to it they have to find other resources like grants and donations to make it happen.”
M-DCPS said it is actively seeking grants and alternative support and partnerships for tree acquisition, planting and maintenance.
“As we were developing this MOU, they asked if we could provide matching support,” said Gilbert, explaining how the county determined how much funding support to provide. “And we looked at our committed budget toward tree planting for this year and determined that we could, in fact, provide matching support. We didn’t want to provide direct support without the school district having some of their own dollars and investments in this program.”
The $200,000 is limited to planting new and native trees on school grounds.
Though the new initiative will bring more trees to communities via school district properties, residential areas and privately owned land – which are key in achieving the 30% goal – aren’t included in the deal.
Gilbert said providing incentives and matching grants to private land owners, businesses and municipal partners is the next step forward.
“We can’t get to this goal without many partners,” she said. “The county doesn’t have enough land to get to that 30% goal, we need certainly our school district, our municipal partners – which we already have a matching grant for. We need our community-based organization partners, the private sector and homeowners on board to realize this goal. This is an important step in that direction.”
“In these 15 communities, the electricity rates are higher or they are spending a disproportionate amount of their income on electricity because it’s so hot in their communities, because the natural effect of tree canopies just isn’t there,” said Toney. “It can be five to seven degrees hotter in those communities as opposed to areas that have more robust tree canopy.”
“We see this as a justice issue because we noticed that higher-income areas have the tree canopy, but we don’t,” said Jackson.
Outside of the partnership with M-DCPS, the county has ongoing efforts directed toward meeting the goal.
“There’s $1.5 million for planting in the right of way, so street trees, there’s about $350,000 that came from the Tree Trust funds this year for the Neat Streets Miami community forestry program, and another $350,000 going toward their matching grant program,” shared Gilbert.
“We have a lot that we’re doing now but it’s not yet adequate,” she added. “To get to our 30% goal, that would require essentially about 6 million net new trees to be planted across the county … We planted and gave away a little over 200,000 trees last year, but we lose trees every year to tropical storms, disease, development or someone deciding to remove a tree because it’s in the way of something else.”
Gilbert says the mayor’s office is working on a comprehensive plan to increase tree canopy that will be presented to the commission this summer.