Press Release: City Council Makes Unfounded Claims about New Orleans’ Tree Canopy 

Contact:  Susannah Burley 504 616 6888

NEW ORLEANS, LA, September 19, 2024 –  At the September 16 Joint Utility, Cable, Telecommunications and Technology and Public Works, Sanitation and Environment Committee meeting, convened to analyze Hurricane Francine-related Entergy New Orleans’ and SWBNO’s communication failures, trees were cast as the major culprits for the power outages, with no specific data provided to back those claims up. 

District C Councilmember Freddie King suggested that a “preventative measure” could be to “cut the oak trees down and replace them with other types of trees with branches not as wide.” SOUL’s Board Chair, Andreas Merkl, responded, “The councilmembers representing two of New Orleans’ most iconic neighborhoods proposing the wholesale removal of oak trees should deeply concern all of us.”

King and Councilmembers Eugene Green and JP Morrell all voiced support to change the language of the memorandum of understanding between Parks & Parkways and Entergy New Orleans to expand the trimming radius around power lines from 4’ to 8’, in alignment with neighboring parishes. 

While no data was provided at the meeting to support the claim that trees were primarily to blame for the outages, at the July 23 meeting of the same committee, Entergy’s own data shows that while only 11% of power outages in the first quarter of 2024 were attributed to vegetation while approximately 35% were attributed to equipment failure and 34% to scheduled outages.

“Our trees are being scapegoated,” says Jesse George, policy director at Alliance for Affordable Energy. “Residents in some of our lowest-income areas experience intense heat island effect as a result of an extreme lack of urban canopy in large swaths of the City, rendering those neighborhoods upwards of 10 degrees hotter than surrounding areas. This creates its own issues with reliability and resilience as we experience more days of extreme heat in the summer — it taxes the grid, leads to outrageously high bills for those who can least afford them, and puts vulnerable residents at risk of heat-related illnesses.”

“Until we have a comprehensive and unified tree ordinance and urban forestry plan in place, ensuring strong protections and best standards of care for our treasured tree canopy, we cannot even begin to talk about expanding the trimming radius,” says Joseph Evans, Arborist and Principal at Evans + Lighter Landscape Architecture.

“Parks & Parkways and the Council have deferred consideration of ordinance protections throughout most of 2024,” says David Marcello of Tree Canopy NOLA. “The City Code provisions governing trees have not been amended since they were adopted in 1956! It’s long past time for New Orleans to get its tree protections into alignment with 21st-century policies.” Parks and Parkways is scheduled to present its tree protection ordinance at the Quality of Life meeting scheduled for October 7 at 1 pm in council chambers.

“We have got to stop demonizing the trees,” says Todd Reynolds, Executive Director of Groundwork New Orleans. “Ten live oak trees on a street soak up 8000 gallons of stormwater per rain event- that’s 8000 gallons that aren’t going into our already overtaxed pumping system. When we lose trees, we’ll see increased street flooding. They are a part of the ecosystem between trees, SWBNO  and Entergy. All three can exist in the ecosystem if we just slow down and work together. It all starts with getting an ordinance in place that will protect the trees.”

In January 2024, Green issued his support of the New Orleans Reforestation Plan at a press conference. This plan has led to an $8mm grant from the USDA and US Forest Service, as well as a portion of the $49.9mm award from the EPA to plant 7,500 trees. However, he made unsubstantiated claims at Monday’s Committee meeting about live oak branches impacting power in Gentilly Terrace saying, “All I saw was trees on wires.” However, Green did not address the fact that this area is undergoing major infrastructure construction with equipment blocking access to critical energy infrastructure.

“It’s nonsensical that the City is willingly taking millions in federal funding to plant trees, while the Council simultaneously calls for their removal. Clearly we need to rethink our approach. Energy resilience is a systems problem, and it requires all of the relevant parties putting their heads together. Currently, though, the City departments who interface with trees are siloed. We can get this right and have reliable energy and the tree canopy we need to shade our streets and absorb stormwater,” says Susannah Burley, Executive Director of SOUL.

“We have a lot of work to do to educate our city leadership to take a more holistic view of the economic and environmental benefits our trees provide,” says Dana Eness, Executive Director of the Urban Conservancy. “We encourage residents to reach out to their council members to express their support for enforceable, coordinated tree protection.”

Residents will have an opportunity to make public comments at the joint Utility, Cable, Telecommunications and Technology, and Climate Change and Resilience Committee meeting on September 25, 2024 at 10 am and at the Quality of Life Committee meeting on October 7 at 1 pm in council chambers.  For those who cannot attend in person, there are instructions on how to access the livestream and submit comments at https://council.nola.gov/home/. 

The orginal press release was revised to reflect meeting times that have changed on 9/23/2024.

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Save Trees with Ordinance Protection (S.T.O.P.) is a coalition comprised of individuals and organizations with two requests of the City: 1) The immediate and transparent enforcement of existing tree protection policies; and 2) A transparent process to create a Unified Tree Policy as called for in the New Orleans Reforestation Plan, which was publicly supported by the Mayor’s Office, City Planning, The Mayor’s Office of Resilience and Sustainability, Parks and Parkways and the City Council at a January 2023 press conference. Learn more about S.T.O.P and get involved at urbanconservancy.org/project/tree-canopy-protection/