Tree-Mendous

2 bridges and tree over Spokane Falls.

SPOKANE - "I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree," the poet Joyce Kilmer wrote. Having won a Tree City USA award each of the last 11 years, it's clear lots of folks in Spokane would probably agree.

On Arbor Day 2014, Mayor David Condon launched the Forest Spokane initiative. Its goal was simple - to enlist neighborhoods across the city in planting 10,000 more trees - cherry and cedar, lilac and beech, oak and Ponderosa pine - by the end of 2016.

Greening Grants of up to $5,000 funded by the City or HUD Community Development Block Grants, he explained, would be awarded to Neighborhood Councils - there are more than 25 in the city - that would coordinate volunteers to plant and nurture the trees, shrubs or perennials and, where necessary, clear areas of dead or dying trees. Planting would only be done in rights-of-ways and on publicly-owned land and in accordance with the City's street tree ordinance and under standards set by the International Society of Arboriculture. "Trees," the Mayor noted, "add beauty and character" to a city, welcoming us to its neighborhoods, even suggesting, that, like them, it's a place where we might want to put down our roots.

But Forest Spokane is about more than aesthetics. As it travels from its source at Lake Coeur d'Alene in Idaho to meet up with the Columbia, the Spokane River flows through Spokane. It's a pretty river, but has long been badly-polluted by discharges from five treatment plants along its banks and mines and smelters further upriver. The City's upgraded its treatment facilities and now is implementing a multi-year effort to reduce pollution from storm water run-off. Planting 10,000 more trees, Mayor Condon noted, will "play a major role in our plans to be smarter about how we use vegetation to help keep storm water from entering our river."

That's not Forest Spokane's only environmental benefit. Visit Spokane in the summer. There's lots to see and do. But, guaranteed, it'll be warm. Typically, reports the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the thermometer tops 90 degrees 19 days every summer in Spokane, compared to just three days in Seattle.

Trees help keep Spokane cool. Air temperatures beneath a tree, says the U.S. Department of Energy, can be as much as 25 degrees cooler than the temperature on exposed blacktop nearby. Three well-placed trees, it says, can cut air conditioning consumption by up to 25 percent, saving a typical homeowner up to $250 in annual utility costs. Imagine the savings 10,000 "well-placed" trees could achieve.

Trees also clean the air we breathe. Recently, Portland State University's Trees & Health team installed a "web" of 144 sensors throughout the metropolitan area to evaluate how effectively trees remove nitrogen dioxide from the air. Its results, published in the November, 2014 issue of Environmental Pollution, found "direct links between the presence of mature trees in a city and the air quality its citizens enjoy" extrapolating that "because of Portland's trees" in a typical year Portlanders 65 and over have 56 fewer hospital stays, kids miss 7,190 fewer days of school and have 21,466 fewer asthma-related episodes and 56 fewer asthma-related visits to emergency rooms. Whether in Portland or Spokane, healthy trees, make for healthy people.

An early freeze cut short the 2014 planting season. But in just two months volunteers planted more than 250 trees. Now they're hoping for an early spring so they can get back to meeting - or exceeding - their goal of 10,000 more trees by 2016. They're confident they will.

It's important they do. Spokane is Washington State's second largest city. When it innovates other cities and towns soon follow. They should. Trees, as Mayor Condon said last Arbor Day, add character to a city. More importantly, though, they reflect the good character of the people who take time to plant them and to nurture them and, in so doing, to making their city a cleaner, healthier and, yes Ms. Kilmer, lovelier place to call home.

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