Goal Pitched: 500 – 750 New Trees A Year

Undergrounding electrical wires. Tree-conscious sidewalk installations. 500 – 750 new trees each year.

The Hamden Alliance for Trees (HAT) recommended to the Hamden Planning and Zoning Commission that it include those goals in a new once‑a decade Plan of Conservation and Development (POCD).

This year, Hamden must update its state-mandated POCD, a document that outlines goals to guide development in the town for the next ten years

At a public hearing Tuesday evening in the Hamden Middle School auditorium, Hamden residents came to share their thoughts on the document. As at previous meetings, advocates for Hamden’s trees showed up in force, calling for stronger language and more action to encourage a healthy canopy in the town.

(Read more about the POCD process here and here).

“There does not seem to be a sense of urgency to plant trees in our town,” Diane Hoffman of HAT told the commission. Destruction caused by climate-change-related disasters is in the news almost every day, she said, and Hamden cannot afford to ignore the benefits that trees provide in combatting climate change and its effects and in improving neighborhoods.

Though she said there is good language in the draft of the POCD, she said she hoped that the commission would add stronger language about protections for trees and more specific steps the town would take to promote tree growth. On behalf of HAT, she proposed four action steps to include in the document:

• Plant 500 – 750 resilient trees each year for the next ten years.

• Implement sidewalk repair practices that don’t harm trees.

• Encourage undergrounding electrical wires.

• Develop a long-term campaign to educate the public on the importance of natural resources, including trees.

“Trees do everything they’re looking to have done,” said Hoffman of the commission. Not only do they help with the environmental sustainability goals of the POCD by capturing carbon and protecting the land from flooding, she said. They also have human health benefits because they remove pollutants from the air and they provide shade that makes neighborhoods more pedestrian friendly and gives them a calmer character.

“Street trees are part of the landscape and the built environment as much as buildings are,” said Central Connecticut State University Professor of History Leah Glaser. Glaser said that trees are an important part of historic preservation.

The POCD draft contains passages and recommendations regarding trees scattered throughout its six sections. The chapter on protecting natural resources contains a full page (44) devoted to explaining the benefits of trees. It also has three specific action items: develop strategies to enhance and protect the canopy in order to prevent runoff, review and modify policies regarding tree canopy maintenance, and identify trees that are more resistant to climate change and promote their use. The section on ​“strategies to promote community character” includes an action item to implement practices to ​“assure the health and efficiency” of trees and a recommendation to maintain a ​“list of recommended trees.”

Hoffman and others said that Hamden has seen significant damage to trees in recent years because of storms. According to Hoffman’s statement to the commission, Hamden lost thousands of trees in last summer’s tornado.

Though storms can raze thousands of trees all at once, they also contribute indirectly to continued tree destruction — not by the force of the wind but by the saws of the utilities.

When Connecticut experienced a few big storms in the early 2010s, said HAT Member Henry Dynia, the utilities ​“made a decision that the thing to do was attack our trees.”

In order to counteract the effects of tree-cutting and improve Hamden’s tree canopies, Hoffman recommended that the commission add a clause to the POCD stating that the Hamden Tree Commission and other relevant commissions and groups should develop a tree-planting plan.

Another one of her recommendations would address the utility’s cutting of trees more specifically: undergrounding wires.

“Hamden’s beautiful assets are almost universally degraded by the ugly mess hanging over our streets,” Dynia told the commission.

He told the Independent that with Connecticut’s increasingly frequent major storms, there is now more than just an aesthetic incentive to put electrical wires underground. When the utilities simply cut the trees to make way for wires, they just grow back. Placing the wires underground is a permanent solution.

He said that the process could take up to 100 years ​“because you don’t want the financial aspect to prevent it from happening or shut it down prematurely.”

He said that now is the time to start. ​“Maybe if enough people have this conversation now in 2019, maybe by the 22nd century no one will be having this conversation because all of the wiring will be out of sight.”

Treasure Buried

The POCD draft contains one recommendation that ​“over the long term,” the town should ​“seek to put overhead wires into underground conduits where lines/circuits will have the greatest impact if they fail.” Hoffman and HAT recommended that the commission upgrade that recommendation to an action item that should be a priority in the next ten years.

The Planning and Zoning Commission itself does not have the power to direct either a tree-planting or a wire undergrounding plan. It can make recommendations in the POCD that other commissions or town departments spearhead programs, but ultimately, it is up to those other entities to decide whether or not to carry out recommendations.

The POCD, said Town Planner Dan Kops, often does not get as specific as naming a certain number of trees that other commissions or departments should plant. ​“This is a plan, not a detailed set of work orders,” he said.

Commission Member Paul Begemann said that when the POCD contains specific action items, they usually pertain to planning and zoning regulations, over which the commission has direct jurisdiction. Matters administered by other town commissions or departments, he said, tend not to have as high a level of specificity.

Yet Kops said that the Planning and Zoning Department and the commission would think about the recommendations they heard on Tuesday.

“We’ll certainly give it due consideration. We understand the importance of trees,” he said.