Health & Fitness
Borough Trees Provide Plenty Bang for the Buck
The services provided by the borough's park and street trees at more than $350,000 annually. The annual per tree budget has been between $16 and $32.
One of the hallmarks of Phoenixville is that mature trees line the streets of many of its neighborhoods.
Trees provide many benefits in an urban environment including lowering air temperatures and noise levels, reducing storm water runoff and soil erosion, cleaning air and water, and improving aesthetics. Regulated trees within the Borough include those in parks and street trees along public right-of-ways.
Phoenixville has a long history of stewardship in maintaining these regulated street trees and has been a registered Tree City USA for several years. You may see the newly erected Tree City USA signs along all the major roadways entering the Borough.
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The Borough Tree Advisory Commission (TAC) recently used the U.S. Forest Service's i-Tree software to evaluate Phoenixville's street tree inventory to estimate the value of the services provided by the borough's park and street trees at more than $350,000 annually. In addition, the replacement value of the trees is nearly $25 million.
The large, mature trees provide an enormous amount of beauty and cooling shade, but they also require maintenance (e.g., removal of dead branches) and eventually removal once they die or become hazardous.
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The TAC believes that the benefits outweigh the costs by a large margin. A tree provides value in two ways: the value of the services that it provides and the cost of replacing it. For example, in Phoenixville the average oak provides more than $200 worth of services annually when you put a dollar value on electricity savings, air pollution reduction, storm water runoff savings, and aesthetics. Can you picture the sterile landscape of concrete, brick, steel, and asphalt Phoenixville would be without street trees?
Over the past five years, the borough has been spending between 40 and 80 thousand dollars per year on regulated tree maintenance and removals. Since the Borough’s street tree inventory indicates that the urban tree resource consists of approximately 2,400 trees, the annual per tree budget has been between $16 and $32.
Although progress has been made, in reality, this is still not adequate to complete all the needed trimmings and removals so the TAC continues to advocate for increased funding.
