The New Year is off to a busy start at the City of Kirkland! The City Council will be meeting next Tuesday, January 15, and there are a number of topics that will be of interest to Kirkland community members. The City Council will receive a presentation on the 2018 Greenhouse Gas Emissions Report, which includes our first ever community-wide emissions report. Councilmembers will also receive a presentation on the Kingsgate Park and Ride Transit-Oriented Development Feasibility Study, and discuss their preliminary 2019-2020 City Work Program.

Later in the meeting, Council will continue discussion regarding approving a process for filling the Council vacancy created by the retirement of Councilmember Walen. Councilmember Walen announced her retirement from the Council, effective January 31, 2019, in order to devote her time to serving her constituents in the Washington State House of Representatives. The City Council will be opening the application process soon to fill the vacancy. The individual that is selected will serve on the Council through the certification of the November 2019 election. Any individual appointed may also file to run for the seat in that election. If you think that you might be interested in applying to fill the vacancy on the City Council, we strongly encourage you to review the materials on the City website. 

The complete agenda for the January 15 meeting will be available along with the Council Packet on the City website this Friday.

The City of Kirkland is currently undergoing a project to update its tree code. To make sure the community has the opportunity to be engaged in this conversation we are publishing a series of informational articles. In the previous article, we looked at canopy cover, one of three performance measures used to determine if we achieved our goal of having a healthy, resilient urban forest with 40% canopy cover. In this article, we’ll look at another performance measure: tree species diversity.

Species diversity is important so that pests, disease or climate change won’t gravely impact large portions of our urban forest, like Dutch elm disease has done on the east coast. Rigorously regulating species diversity on private property is challenging, but the City can encourage it with tree giveaways and greater public awareness. To improve urban forest resiliency, we can manage our public trees with species diversity goals. Then, when trends arise, we can make minor code changes to help vary the composition of our urban forest.       

A recent study revealed one particular species has been planted excessively on development sites to meet tree code requirements. Arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis) represents about one-third of new plantings on over 150 lots created from short plats from 2008 to 2013. On many of those properties, very little other vegetation was present, so a serious pest or disease affecting arborvitae would result in a loss to canopy cover and community character. We wouldn’t want to ban planting any one tree species (unless it’s invasive), but a minor change to the existing code limiting the use of arborvitae on development sites can achieve greater species diversity over time. More information on the Tree Code Update is available on the City website.  

In the next article, we’ll look at the last of 3 urban forest performance measures: uneven-aged trees.