The City of Bloomington announced 304 locations earlier this month as potential spots to plant trees for a more equitable tree cover. As part of the city’s Bicentennial Bond program, $800,000 was allocated to street tree planting. A quarter of this fund will be used on equitable tree coverage in the city starting this spring.
Managing director for IU’s Environmental Resilience Institute Sarah Mincey said research shows urban canopy coverage has typically been in areas that are higher income with a higher percentage of white populations.
The city’s Urban Forester, Erin Hatch, said Bloomington is taking an environmental justice approach.
“For this project, we looked at median income and also percentage of non-white individuals within different geographies in the city of Bloomington,” she said.
Some of the benefits of having more trees in a city include improved air quality, flooding mitigation, storing carbon and providing shade and wind blocks, which can reduce energy bills.
While Bloomington isn’t the first city to put money towards spreading those benefits, Mincey said the way Hatch has used data is innovative.
“I think that we are on the cutting edge to be doing the kind of analysis that has been done by our city's urban forester, looking very, very carefully at many different factors that go into determining where we need to be planting trees to improve equity,” Mincey said.
The data used includes geospatial analysis to determine pre existing canopy, a dataset of vacant planting spots in the public right-of-way, along with demographic data from the Census.
Mincey said the Environmental Resilience Institute is also working to assess canopy coverage across the state in several communities. The assessment includes analyzing socioeconomic variables.
“We're hoping that you know, within a year we'll be able to say there are many cities across Indiana that have undertaken this kind of analysis,” Mincey said.
Mincey said it’s important for community members to understand that some of the planting locations identified for the city may not appear in lower-income neighborhoods, but the city is restrained by having viable planting locations.
Trees must be planted in the public right-of-way along the street and sidewalk, where other infrastructure, like lights or underground utilities, don’t interfere.
Chosen locations can be found on the city’s website. Today is the last day for property owners to offer feedback about the location of trees.
The city will hire contractors to plant the trees, beginning in April or May. Fall planting will begin in October or November.
A previous version of this story indicated that $800,000 would be used for the project this spring. Only a quarter of those funds are being used for this phase of the project. The rest of the funding will target other areas of Bloomington.
