Trees are a valuable community asset, enhancing our parks and open spaces, reducing urban heat island impacts, capturing air pollution, intercepting stormwater runoff, and improving safety in our neighborhoods and business districts. A healthy, thriving, and sustainable urban forest is a community priority, to be thoughtfully managed and cared for by partnerships between the City and our community.
Beginning in 2017, Tacoma's Urban Forestry workgroup, and a team of consultants, partners, and stakeholders, embarked on a journey to evaluate the existing services, processes, and outcomes of urban forest management in Tacoma, with the intent to provide a better level of service to our community. This kicked off a two year process of extensive research, interviews with staff who administer urban forest policy and codes, and community engagement. This work is summarized in the UFMP Phase 1 Research Summary. Resulting from this first phase of development, a body of recommended policy changes, service upgrades, and best practices was compiled and vetted and adopted by City Council. This became the Urban Forest Management Plan (UFMP), also referred to as the "UFMP Phase 2 Action Plan". Adopted by City Council in December 2019 (RES40492), the UFMP strengthens urban forestry goals, strategies, actions, and targets throughout Tacoma. The plan works in tandem with the 2015 One Tacoma Comprehensive Plan and the 2021 Climate Action Plan (formerly the 2016 Environmental Action Plan).
The Plan
The UFMP outlines meaningful actions that the City and our partners are committed to taking, with support from the community, between 2020 and 2030 to protect and grow our community forest. To reach our Comprehensive Plan goal of an increase from 20% tree canopy (the lowest in the region) to a healthy, thriving, 30% overall tree canopy coverage, we will need to create greater efficiencies in our operations, standardize our level of service across the city, expand methods for increasing and preserving tree canopy in Tacoma, and respond to the challenges of climate change, as well as other environmental and fiscal pressures.
The UFMP functions as a management tool for City staff to support citywide environmental health that is transparent to the public regarding the actions taken on behalf of the broader community. The UFMP also sets standards for tracking and reporting progress toward our goals.
- Introduction
- Table of Contents
- Executive Summary
- Element 1 – Existing Policies and Plans
- Element 2 – City Staff Interviews
- Element 3 – Urban Forest Benchmarks
- Element 4 – High-Level & In-Depth Data Analysis
- Element 5 – Community Unterests & Input
- Element 6 – The Urban Forest Audit System
- Conclusion
- Appendices
- Introduction
- Table of Contents
- Executive Summary
- Strategy 1 – Management Policy
- Strategy 2 – professional Capacity
- Strategy 3 – Funding & Authority
- Strategy 4 – Inventories & Plans
- Strategy 5 – Risk & Disaster Management
- Strategy 6 – Community Engagement
- UFMP Action Plan Timetable
- Conclusion
- Appendices