Funds awarded town to replant street trees

Coulee Dam will get state and federal help planting new trees on a street it clear cut last summer.

The state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) announced this week it will award Coulee Dam $71,180 for the work.

The project is designed to restore and enhance Ferry Avenue’s tree canopy. More than 30 90-year-old maples were removed unexpectedly during a sidewalk replacement project in 2023.

City engineer Marisa Stevens, of TD&H Engineering, applied for the funding to plant 24 new trees along Ferry Avenue, which was stripped of more than 30 of its 90-year-old maples last year so its buckled sidewalks could be replaced. Tree roots were too large to allow the trees to survive if cut or ground down.

Stevens said root barriers that force roots to grow vertically, not horizontally, are now standard and will be included in the planting. It will be interesting to see if they work, she told the town council in December.

The DNR grant is one of 45 across the state that will spend a record $8 million on its Urban and Community Forestry Grant Program.

“The record-shattering dollar amount is 14 times bigger than the previous single-year record of $550,000 and is nearly three times the total grants awarded by … DNR for urban and community forestry projects since 2008,” the agency said in a release Feb. 29.

“Access to clean air, shade, and green spaces should be a basic human right, but the fact is that throughout our state, lower-income communities and communities of color more often live in neighborhoods with more concrete and asphalt, and too few trees,” said Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz. “We need to bring the same urgency we brought to our wildfire crisis to our efforts to ensure everyone lives in neighborhoods with adequate tree canopy. Trees and tree equity are essential for our quality of life. As temperatures rise and economic disparities widen, trees are no longer a nice-to-have, they are a must-have.”

Neighborhoods with adequate tree canopy cover can be as much as 14 degrees cooler during the worst heat waves, Franz said. “Where there is heat, there is death, such as when more than 100 people lost their lives to the 2021 heat dome,” she said.

More than $23.5 million had been requested of DNR by 122 applications. Due to that number of applications, more than half of which came from areas of poor environmental health and low tree equity, DNR chose to allocate an additional $1 million of state Climate Commitment funding into the grant program, increasing its share to $3 million. The remaining $5 million is Inflation Reduction Act money awarded to DNR by the USDA Forest Service in 2023.