In October 2022, during city budget hearings, Streets and Sanitation Commissioner Cole Stallard acknowledged to City Council members that when it came to tree maintenance, his department was failing.

The department’s Bureau of Forestry was falling far behind on trimming dead, diseased or obtrusive branches from the trees along the city’s streets — a vital step to growing and maintaining the city’s tree canopy.

The culprit? The department’s longstanding policy of relying on complaints to guide their crews.

“Chasing 311s on trimming does not work,” Stallard said.

Stallard argued for a new system made up of hundreds of grids that would send crews to every corner of the city, block by block, until each one of Chicago’s nearly 600,000 public trees was assessed and trimmed if needed. It would upend an unwritten rule of Chicago government that ward offices run the show on constituent services, instead letting downtown supervisors prioritize trims based on citywide need. But Stallard begged alderpeople’s patience, predicting the change could boost the number of annual trims by up to 30%. 

Eighteen months after the new system went into effect, a review of trimming data by Illinois Answers Project shows the commissioner’s prediction was wrong.

Trims did not increase by 30%.

They increased by 118%.

Directing crews to work tree-by-tree and block-by-block instead of crisscrossing the city to chase complaints has unlocked efficiencies few thought possible, officials said. Trees that had become dangerous over more than a decade of neglect are now getting attention from arborists. The overhaul has set the city’s tree canopy on pace for a potential top-to-bottom refresh by 2030. Department leaders hope that will mean less damage to cars and homes, fewer trees felled by disease and damage — and a sharp drop in complaints to ward offices.

“It’s going to make things a lot better,” Stallard said in an interview with Illinois Answers Project last month. “In five to six years, when you’re able to look at that healthy tree canopy … people are really going to be able to see the benefit.”

The switch to area-based trimming has not come easily. While more trees are getting trimmed, some alderpeople have balked at the new system because they have less influence on which jobs get done when. They complain that the department does little to communicate with them and even when crews do show up, they sometimes do a poor job. It’s also unclear whether city-employed trimmers will be able to finish a pass around the city in time for the strategy to pay off.

Still, the overhaul and expansion of the city’s $15 million tree trimming system represents a seismic shift away from a parochial, inefficient program vulnerable to political favoritism and toward a more professional — and equitable — standard that has already shown clear results, experts say.

Before the switch, requests for trims varied widely by ward, with majority-white wards on the North and Northwest Side represented heavily among the wards with most complaints. Since the switch, the 4th Ward on the South Side and the 28th and 27th Wards on the West Side have seen the most trees visited by city crews.   

The transformation comes five years after a report by the Chicago Office of the Inspector General called Streets and Sanitation’s complaint-based method “inefficient and ineffective.”

In an interview, Inspector General Deborah Witzburg cited the change-up as a valuable example for others to follow.

“This is a really important proof of concept in a world of finite resources,” Witzburg said.

Why tree trims matter

In West Pullman last month, Linda Hodge stepped out her front door in the pouring rain and into a scene she had never witnessed in the 14 years she’s lived there. A city worker was perched in a cherry picker about 20 feet above the sidewalk, taking a chainsaw to the branches of a mature maple tree across the street.

When she saw the workers, Hodge came outside to ask them if they could trim the tree in front of her house next, she said.

“The branches fall down and I have to drag them to the alley so they can get thrown away … every time it rains,” Hodge said, peering under the hood of her neon raincoat. 

Falling leaves and branches have been a nuisance ever since Hodge moved to the 11500 block of South Bishop Street in 2010, she said. The debris clogs sewer drains and worsens flooding after every storm. It blocks the road and sidewalks. School children fight with the sticks and branches.

“On this block right here, it’s mostly seniors,” Hodge said. “We can’t come out here and keep picking this trash up off the sidewalk, so everybody can be safe to walk down the street.”

Before the switch to the area trim system, Hodge would have needed to call her alderperson or 311 to request for a city crew. Then, she would have needed to wait up to three years for Streets and Sanitation to work through its backlog of requests before getting to Bishop Street.

Ald. Andre Vasquez (40th), one of the early proponents of the grid system, said that after he was elected in 2019, the dysfunction of the system surprised him. He described entering a request for a trim in his ward and seeing an estimate of two weeks for it to be addressed. When he checked back on the request a year later, the estimate was the same: two weeks, he said.

“That was just unacceptable,” Vasquez said. “That was something that we could address, because that was our No. 1 complaint from constituents.”

More than just a nuisance to residents, the dysfunction represented a threat to city leaders’ long-term goals of regrowing the city’s tree canopy, which has been decimated by pests and diseases in recent years.

Tree abundance is credited for myriad public benefits in cities, from lower pollution and cooler summer temperatures to higher property values and even reductions in crime. Not coincidentally, tree cover in Chicago neighborhoods varies widely based on average income and race.

“It’s easier to get investment, get excitement, about tree-planting and then just ignore the mature trees that are really providing all the benefits — shade, reducing respiratory illness, reducing extreme heat incidents, that sort of thing,” said Ian Leahy, senior advisor of urban forestry for the nonprofit American Forests, based in Washington, D.C. “Maintaining a tree well can extend its life quite a bit, and therefore extend its benefits to the residents.”

Making the shift

The switch took more than a year of planning and a significant boost to the department’s budget before it could get underway.

At a 2021 budget hearing — the first after Stallard took over as Street and Sanitation commissioner — then-veteran Ald. Tom Tunney (44th) lamented the switch from a ward-by-ward trim network to a complaint-based system after 311 was implemented in 1999.

“This one-off, one-off and one-off on a constituent request isn't the best way to address and manage this system,” Tunney said.

The upgrade would be impossible, Stallard responded, as long as his department’s Bureau of Forestry had just 14 crews responsible for maintaining the city’s nearly 600,000 parkway trees.

The next year, Vasquez and other members of the City Council lobbied to boost funding for the Bureau of Forestry. The council approved funding for 210 employees dedicated to tree trimming and removal in 2024, up from 191 such workers in 2023 and 160 in 2022.

Their efforts were buoyed by the city’s new Office of Equity and Racial Justice, which zeroed in on uneven tree maintenance as an underappreciated barrier to racial justice in Chicago.

Chicago officials have found that people in lower-income neighborhoods are less likely to file complaints or requests, often driving services away from those who need them most.

The finding was underlined in a report published earlier this year by the city’s inspector general that urged more proactive policies across city government.

“We can more equitably provide city services if we are planning service provisions based on an assessment of need or risk, not simply by responding to the squeaky wheels,” Witzburg said. 

At the beginning of 2023, Streets and Sanitation stopped taking 311 requests for tree trims, except for emergencies like blocked roads or impacted power lines. Workers spent months working down their backlog of requests before sending crews in April 2023 onto the first of 800 half-mile-square grids spanning the city.

“Once we really looked at it through a new scope, and a new set of eyes, we realized there are people out there who aren’t calling 311,” Stallard said. “We had trees that have been not trimmed, ever.”

In the meantime, the department roughly doubled the number of trucks with tree-trimming crews it had on the road.

Managers had no formula to prioritize where to trim first. But their first pass in 2023 concentrated on some of the areas with the most complaints, combined with areas where residents “just never called,” Stallard said. 

“We want to get into those areas and do the heavy lift now,” the commissioner said.

The department closed about 20,000 requests to trim trees each year between 2019 and 2022, according to an Illinois Answers Project review of 311 data. A Streets and Sanitation spokesperson estimated about 40,000 trees were trimmed per year during that time, since crews often trimmed multiple trees to fulfill each request.

Less than four months after sending crews into the grid network, Bureau of Forestry Deputy Commissioner Malcolm Whiteside announced that 30,000 trees had already been pruned under the new regime.

“Process is proving highly successful,” Whiteside said, according to the minutes of the Aug. 3, 2023, meeting of the city’s Urban Forestry Advisory Board. “Hoping to still gain more efficiencies as time goes on.”

In March, the Chicago Office of the Inspector General highlighted the success of the tree trim overhaul in a report encouraging more city departments to move away from complaint-based service delivery. The city watchdog pointed to multiple departments whose reactive systems “resulted in long-term costs, inequities and safety risks.” They included the Chicago Department of Buildings, whose safety inspection system has been shown by multiple Illinois Answers Project and Chicago Tribune investigations to repeatedly fail city residents.

“This is not a call to eliminate complaint-based service provision,” Witzburg said of the report. “What we are getting at here is that Chicagoans are best served by an approach which reflects a balance where we're doing proactive and planned service provision while also equipping ourselves to respond to specific and time-sensitive needs.”

Fielding complaints

Even with the spike in productivity, the new trim system has plenty of detractors. They include Edward Bury, who has been trying for months to get the city to trim the honey locust tree looming over his Avondale home. 

“There’s one … branch that’s hanging over my yard,” Bury said. “It hasn’t fallen down yet — I worry when I walk into the yard near the fence, it will fall on me.”

When Bury asked his alderperson’s office to put in a trim request, a ward staffer informed him of the new system. He would have to wait for a trim, and the staffer could not tell him for how long.

Residents can make 311 requests for tree obstructions that “constitute emergencies.” The department does not define an emergency, but it typically refers to when trees fall and block streets or lean on utility wires, Stallard said — not dead or wayward branches that may soon fall, like the one one over Bury’s yard.

Although some alderpeople have credited the department for the results of the area trim system, others have expressed frustration over their lack of options in situations like Bury’s.

Ald. Scott Waguespack (32nd) said his staff fields multiple calls per week complaining of tree emergencies. Some say they’re unsatisfied even after their street has been visited. Now, each ward office has to weigh whether to elevate the complaint to the department or simply tell their constituents to wait in line.

“It is a huge volume thing for us,” Waguespack said. “We tell people, ‘Look, we’re on a grid.’ If they missed your tree in that grid, you’ve got to kind of wait until they come back around again, which can be forever.” 

Ald. Marty Quinn (13th), whose Southwest Side ward office has a decades-old reputation for fast-tracking constituent services, was skeptical of the 2023 switch-up. He called on the department to emphasize communication with alderpeople who can pinpoint the blocks with the highest need.

“I think [area trimming] could work, as long as there continues to be a nuance for residents that call aldermanic offices to take requests,” Quinn told Illinois Answers Project last month. “The numbers are great, but I’m concerned about that blind spot.”

The new system has not stopped some alderpeople from trying to intervene on behalf of constituents looking to jump the queue. In August, ward offices emailed Whiteside, the Bureau of Forestry chief, 12 times asking for immediate trims, according to a records request by Illinois Answers.

Whiteside fielded two requests from Ald. Jason Ervin’s (28th) office, including one from a resident that a crew revisit a tree they said was “still a liability” despite having been trimmed. Separately, Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th) asked Whiteside to set aside crews for a barrage of tree trims as part of a targeted crime intervention strategy in Pilsen.

In an interview, Sigcho-Lopez described the grid-based system as a “one-size-fits-all” strategy and said the department should leave room for council members to fast-track priorities in their wards.

“Tree trimming is one of those things where … this can be creating safety concerns, blocking lighting, damaging buildings,” Sigcho-Lopez said. “There are cases where the alderperson should be able to expedite, and have a criteria as to why.” 

Staffers from Ald. Emma Mitts’ (37th) and Ald. Bennett Lawsons’ (44th) offices also requested trims for trees that were hovering over or touching their constituents’ homes. The city provided no records showing that Whiteside responded by email.

With more than 4,200 trees trimmed in his West Side ward under the new area-based system, Ervin’s constituents have so far been the city’s greatest beneficiaries of the program. Ald. Felix Cardona’s 31st Ward on the Northwest Side, had been visited the least as of September, with fewer than 1,500 trees pruned.

In an interview, Cardona said the grid system “doesn’t work.”

“It’s not efficient to our wards, because we have to wait,” Cardona said.

Cardona said he preferred the complaint-based system, when alderpeople could leverage their relationships in the Bureau of Forestry to ensure trim requests were answered.

“If you have a relationship within the department, you’re not going to be waiting 18 months” for a tree trim request to be fulfilled, Cardona said. “If you’re an effective alderman, you’re going to do what you have to do to get the service done right away.”

Others have complained that trimming crews who visited their blocks under the new system have done incomplete jobs. 

Suzanne Malec-McKenna, who was commissioner of the Chicago Department of the Environment from 2007 to 2012, said a crew that visited her block in Edgewater pruned only low-lying branches but left the top half of some trees untouched — a practice known as a “broccoli spear.”

“It depends on the crew,” Malec-McKenna said. “By broccoli spearing, they’re going to get some of the bad branches, but they don’t get into the crown as much.”

Trimming crews are not given explicit instructions on which branches to cut and which to leave alone, Stallard said. Instead, they are extensively trained by arborists and then trusted to make spot decisions. Supervisors are also tasked with following up to make sure trimmers didn’t miss anything, he said.

“We’ll get complaints — ‘Hey, they didn’t get this branch,’ and “This branch goes over my driveway and I’m worried it’s going to fall,’” Stallard said. “But [the expectation] is, clear houses, clear lots, raise trees so people can walk through underneath — there’s a standard.”

An unclear path forward

Stallard and supporters of the proactive system hope complaints will ease once trimmers have completed their first cycle around the city. But a key factor will be how long it takes for them to do that, experts say.

Colette Copic, a community specialist with the Chicago Regional Tree Initiative at the Morton Arboretum in west suburban Lisle, said most trees benefit from attention every three-to-five years — but for local agencies with stretched resources, arborists say even one visit every seven years is acceptable. 

“I am happy to hear [Chicago] is taking that proactive action,” Copic said. “It seems to be working.”

Whether Streets and Sanitation is keeping pace with industry standards depends on how its progress is being measured.

As of September, city workers had completed trims on only 119 of its 800 grids, which would appear to put it on pace for about a 10-year cycle. However, the department claimed to have trimmed nearly 124,000 of the city’s estimated 580,000 trees in the public way, which would put it on pace to complete a full circuit by 2030.

Stallard said he’s focused on the latter metric.

The most unpredictable variable may be storms, which litter the city with tree emergencies and force the department to pause trims until they’ve cleared, the commissioner said. That’s why the department has resisted setting expectations for when each grid will get its turn.

Still, visiting every tree on Chicago property within six years “is attainable,” Stallard said. “It is attainable if we’re able to keep our staffing levels, our equipment — and if the weather just cooperates with us for a little bit.”

The pouring rain did not stop crews from giving attention to the entirety of Linda Hodge’s street in West Pullman — including the tree she had hoped to see trimmed in front of her home. But she did complain afterward to the city workers that they didn’t finish the job.

“There’s still a lot of dead [branches] up there,” Hodge said in an interview this month. “They told me I needed to call my alderman.”

Note: Streets and Sanitation is asking residents to request new tree plantings along streets in their neighborhoods. Request a new tree by calling 311 or filing an online request here.