Big Results for Big Trees When Portland Bureaus Work Together

An unusual collaboration among four city agencies is proof that large-form trees can be preserved when Portland builds new roads and sidewalks.

By Kyna Rubin

March 17, 2022

For years, “Lake Mill” is how Montavilla neighborhood kids and parents referred to the muck and standing water they had to wade through to reach Bridger Elementary School at SE 80th Avenue and Mill Street. Parked cars lining unimproved streets forced young and old to walk next to traffic while trying to avoid crater-size potholes. The sewer was backing up in people’s homes.

February 2022 marked the official completion of the $3.8 million improvement project, which yielded brand new roads, sidewalks, curbs, and water and sewer systems for residents who had lived decades without. In the process, the multiple City bureaus involved worked in alignment to preserve the valuable large-form trees in the area through a creative use of design and techniques rarely if ever seen in big City projects. The centerpiece is a median on SE 80th just south of Mill Street holding five mature Douglas-firs that would have been removed had PBOT not deviated from its usual standards. But other large trees within the project boundaries were also carefully preserved.

How did the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT), the Bureau of Environmental Services (BES), the Water Bureau, and Parks’ Urban Forestry pull it off? And if they could retain large existing trees here, why can’t it be done as a matter of course?

Putting a LID on It

The SE 80th/Mill tree preservation was carried out under the aegis of a local improvement district, or LID, which is a mechanism for residents to receive infrastructure upgrades.  Property owners adjacent to the new or updated streets form an agreement with the City to assess themselves to contribute to the cost, usually based on how much road frontage their individual properties occupy. PBOT provides financing for the assessments to be paid off over time. 

Over the last twenty years, says Andrew Aebi, PBOT’s Local Improvement District Administrator, he has worked on some sixty LIDs, about three a year. Annually he gets hundreds of calls, disproportionately from underserved neighborhoods in East or Southwest Portland, asking how they can form an LID to improve streets and sidewalks. The absence of that infrastructure around the city’s edges is often owing to the rural nature of these areas when they were incorporated into Portland years ago. Miles of gravel roads remain unpaved, and the City can’t meet all the need. LIDs are a potential way to make improvements happen, but setting up an LID is “a little like drilling for oil in west Texas,” says Aebi. Most attempts, he says, are “dry wells”—they don’t lead to a project. Why? The biggest obstacle is cost. That’s what quashed Aebi’s first attempt, in the early 2000s, to form an LID for SE 80th and Mill Street, where residents had been wanting sidewalks and paved streets since the 1950s.

The cost for those homeowners was prohibitive, but in the past other factors also have been at play.

Sometimes efforts to create LIDs failed, says Aebi, because of a “disconnect between what the community wanted and what the engineers came up with.”  PBOT engineers designed the plan without community buy-in, took it to City Council for approval, and said take it or leave it. PBOT revamped its approach in 2003, and since then Aebi says he has early conversations with LID residents about what they want and value—preserving trees, for instance.

What changed between Aebi’s earlier, failed attempt to form an LID at this location and 2018, when the SE 80th/Mill LID was established? Property owners would no longer have to foot the whole bill. This time, Portland Public Schools happened to have money available to contribute to infrastructure projects. And though the Slavic Church Emmanuel, whose large parking lot fronts SE 80th farther south, wasn’t in the original project scope, Aebi said he convinced church leaders to join the LID because City Council had asked PBOT to include an extra 2.5 blocks—where the church came in—to cover what would have been a gap in a planned paved neighborhood greenway. These players’ proportionately larger assessments made costs for individual homeowners more manageable. So too did an unusual cross-bureau partnership as well as investment from BES and the Water Bureau, all strongly supported by late Commissioner Nick Fish. Property owner assessments total about $1.38 million, or 36 percent of total project costs, according to Montavilla Neighborhood Association chair Jacob Loeb, who wrote about the project in the neighborhood newsletter. 

Serendipity

The SE 80th/Mill LID, a success on all accounts, might not have happened. In fall 2016 Aebi says he and a PBOT engineer were touring LID projects when he suggested they look at SE 80th and Mill, back then a wannabe LID that hadn’t launched. His colleague noticed that BES had marked utility locates on SE Mill, indicating upcoming work there. Discovering that BES was already going to tear the road up to install a 20-foot-deep sanitary sewer in the area, Aebi got BES to channel that work into an LID that, this time, succeeded. That’s because, he says, he presented a convincing business case to property owners: by leveraging funding from BES and the Water Bureau to lay the new piping at the same time PBOT built a new street, it made economic and logistical sense for the property owners to invest extra to secure the whole shebang--sorely needed paved streets, sidewalks, a new water main, and a stormwater management system.

Neighbors were ready, says Jacob Loeb (see the 2016 video one resident made to demonstrate the need for improvements). He and the current neighborhood association board weren’t in office when the project began. But he says Montavilla, which straddles both sides of SE 82nd Avenue, has a lot of infrastructure dating back to the early 1900s, so most residents welcome upgrades. And, he says, area bicyclists welcome this stretch as a paved connector to the 70s Greenway, which is scheduled for construction in summer 2022. Despite its name, a good part of the greenway runs along SE 80th. The SE 80th and Mill improvement includes painted sharrows (indicating shared street with bicyclists) in anticipation of being part of the future greenway. The already planned greenway itself was another impetus for the City to invest in the SE 80th/Mill project. 

How Trees Were Preserved

If this particular initiative had been a regular City project, not an LID, the large, healthy trees wouldn’t have had a chance, says an Urban Forestry permitting and regulations staffer. And without the input of the neighborhood, which wanted the big trees preserved, he says Urban Forestry wouldn’t have been as successful in getting PBOT to vary from its typically rigid straight-road and curb designs for the sake of protecting tree roots.

Tree-wise, the showcase of the project is the off-center median holding five large Douglas-firs that had been in the right-of-way but that a homeowner had long fenced in as if they were in her private frontyard. This creative solution to preserving these evergreens resulted from PBOT’s early consultation with Casey Clapp, at the time a development tree inspector for Urban Forestry, part of Portland Parks and Recreation. Urban Forestry reviews all LIDs to ensure they comply with tree code requirements. Clapp was aware that the community wanted to preserve as many large trees as possible. He and Aebi walked the site together and at early meetings Clapp, now an educator and consulting arborist in the Portland area, says he asked lots of feasibility questions, for instance, about raising the road grade over the top of the Douglas-fir roots to avoid digging, and pulling the street as far away as possible from the base of the trees to create a median because there seemed to be space for that. He suggested it was worth sacrificing the smaller trees they would otherwise plant in new four-foot planting strips on either side of the road in order to create a large mid-road space that could hold existing big, healthy trees.  

“Retaining mature trees is immensely more beneficial than planting new, smaller trees,” he says.

In his experience, when you’re building a road where there wasn’t one before there’s always some tension between urban foresters wanting to save big trees and engineers trying to ensure the road matches up with the water and sewer lines and that it’s in a predictable straight line for drivers. These are good things, he says, “but sometimes they’re at odds with tree preservation. Trees don’t grow in straight lines.” 

In this case, because Urban Forestry had a seat at the table early on, Clapp and PBOT engineers could put their heads together to develop ways to work around the large trees. Solutions, he felt, were informed by the original questions he asked the group.

The key solution for preserving the Douglas-firs was creating a median. This was feasible, says PBOT’s Aebi, because SE 80th is a slow-speed, low-traffic street, which reduces the risk to public safety if a car were to run into a tree. And a smaller street requires less expensive transitions alerting drivers to an obstacle like a median ahead. Here on SE 80th Avenue, yellow triangular shapes painted on the road at both ends of the median sufficed. On a busier, faster road like Burnside or Sandy, safety standards would call for more robust, longer transitions comprising extra curbs and more concrete.

Importantly, too, to work around the trees PBOT did not adhere to the standard symmetrical street design but rather shifted the center road line--the median is off-center. This deviation was possible because of the extra right-of-way room to do it.

Another plus is that the Douglas-firs retained inside the median had already figured out how to survive having cars driven around them for many decades, according to Clapp. Further, the Water Bureau removed a six-inch water main that was five feet east of the Douglas-firs. That’s where the neighbor’s grassy right-of-way had been and where the trees had spread its roots.  A new main was installed about nine feet away from the other side of the trees, where the bureau didn’t encounter roots, says an Urban Forestry staffer, because “tree roots don’t go into the street if they can avoid it.”

The project also departed from the norm to preserve two treasured neighborhood trees. PBOT built a 9-foot curb bump-out to protect space around a sycamore maple on the corner of 80th and Market, and designed a new Mill Street sidewalk to accommodate a Western redcedar. Under Clapp’s direction, moreover, the PBOT contractors with whom he worked also took steps to handle with care large trees in private yards that could be affected by the construction. Clapp gives a lot of credit to them for “taking pains” to communicate closely with him.

As Clapp saw it, even if a tree didn’t survive despite their best efforts, at least they would have the opportunity to protect the space the tree was growing in and could plant a new large-form tree there.

A Unicorn?

Was this project unique, an unreplicable aberration? PBOT’s Andrew Aebi says luck played a role in bringing this LID together “very nicely and very quickly.” Because of how the LID came about, he calls the bureaus’ collaborative approach here “accidental capital improvement coordination,” and says that having bureaus partner like this was “a pathbreaking model.” 

Aebi calls the partnership with Urban Forestry in the field “the secret sauce” that made this project successful. Former Urban Forestry employee Casey Clapp, who rates this project as one of his proudest, explains that he was an equal partner whose voice was heard. He attributes this to the fact that the property owners in this LID demanded accountability around preserving big trees. (Saving trees is not necessarily a priority for all LIDs.) Moreover, Clapp finds that in huge City engineering projects that require massive trenching, urban foresters can’t fight the engineers, and retaining trees isn’t feasible. And in contrast to the SE 80th project, he observes, Urban Forestry’s say in private development is greatly diminished because accountability for trees is absent. Trees are not built into the planning early enough to preserve them in the overall design. Permit applicants can easily use building requirements and a house’s design as reasons to justify removing trees.

Positive Precedents Set

The SE 80th Avenue/Mill Street LID might be an anomaly but shows what’s feasible. Even if the cross-bureau cooperation central to the happy outcome was more the result of circumstances that occurred, in part, serendipitously, the project illustrates that bureaus can cooperate to save trees if they have the incentive to do it. Just think if bureaus applied the same collaborative approach intentionally to all city projects.

PBOT has the ability to think and act more creatively to preserve large trees. And if Urban Forestry experts are brought in early as an equal partner on all citywide projects affecting large, healthy trees, Portland’s canopy, which a City study and PSU research show is shrinking, would have hope of better protection.

Aebi would like to think that moving forward, PBOT will replicate the process of walking a site early on with Urban Forestry. He says PBOT has done this for its new SE 155th Avenue/Main Street/Millmain Drive LID project going to City Council for approval in March 2022. On the south side of Parklane Park, at SE 155th and Main, PBOT plans to preserve the row of trees running parallel to the rights-of-way.                  

If it’s true, as Aebi says, that PBOT is “always trying to see what we can do to preserve a tree of significant size,” we can only hope that the bureau applies this effort to all of its work, not only to LIDs where neighbors wanting to preserve trees have a direct say. Moreover, the City should create effective mechanisms for Urban Forestry and nearby neighbors to have early, on-site, weight-carrying input into any City public improvement project or private development involving potential large-tree removal. But these changes in the status quo will not happen without City Council leadership.

The blessing of new streets and sidewalks often brings with it the curse of losing precious shade due to tree removal. Portlanders facing lethal summer temperatures are counting on City leaders to take more dramatic, significant actions to preserve our big-tree canopy.