Watertown’s urban forest needs your help! Can you join Trees for Watertown for a postcard-writing party next Thursday?
Planning for a healthy future urban forest is tremendously important as our city prepares for the effects of climate change on human health. For the first time, Watertown’s Budget & Fiscal Oversight Committee has included for the next fiscal year a budget guideline that directly addresses the need to invest in strong, far-sighted planning to support Watertown’s urban forest.
Next step is to ensure this important guideline gets funded! Please join a postcard-writing party on December 13, and invite your friends and neighbors too!
To maintain even the percentage of urban tree canopy protecting us today, Cambridge’s Urban Forest Task Force projections show that stemming the loss of existing canopy plus an accelerated tree planting program are both necessary. (See the two attached graphs.)
Meeting this goal requires investment in smart, well-informed, long-term municipal planning. Watertown has fourteen FY2020 budget guidelines including this important forestry guideline. To ensure this forestry guideline is adequately funded, our Town Councilors must rank it high in the line-up. The Councilors’ budget guideline ranking period will begin on December 11 and end on December 18.
Can you come next Thursday to write postcards to your Town Councilor and Councilors-at-Large, encouraging them to up-rank this important forestry guideline? Blank postcards and stamps, and sample texts if needed, will be supplied.
Please let Trees for Watertown know if you can help.