Cuyahoga County to Plant 1,500 Trees in Canopy Restoration Effort, But Residents' Role in Solution Looms

Cuyahoga County’s tree canopy is about a third of what county advocates said it could be. Credit: Mark Oprea

Fifteen-hundred trees are to be planted and grown on public land in Cuyahoga County in the next few years, the result of $1.2 million in grant rollout, county representatives said this week.

That money, which hails from the county’s annual investment into trees, will equate to some 200 trees planted in Parma; 128 in Olmsted Township; 130 in Bedford; 18 in Lakeview Cemetery; along with a dozen other projects intending to keep parts of our canopy we’ve let go over the decades. (Cleveland got its tree due in 2023.)

And, according to data from the last county survey in 2019, there’s a lot of space to fill: the current tree coverage of Cuyahoga County—some 96,000 acres—is roughly a third of the land area that’s viable for greenery.

With the Urban Forestry Commission set to mesh its goals with Cleveland’s new Division of Forestry, optimists might see this influx of millions of dollars dedicated to sprouting new elms or sumacs across the city as a fine beacon of good things to come. Meaning the possible restoration of our depleted canopy by 2040.

Yet, city and county specialists share similar anxieties about an aspect of grant dollars not easily influenced: the plots of private land that lie where the sidewalk ends.

In other parlance: the pesky, vague sphere of the tree lawn.

“It’s been my personal experience that residents have a wide variety of attitudes towards trees that shed leaves on their property,” Jenita McGowan, the county’s chief of climate and sustainability, told Scene.

“If the residents wanted it, they thought there’d be an overwhelming want and need,” her colleague, Mary Cierebiej, the county’s director of Administrative, Planning, Information and Research, added.

In past years, “people were not interested because again, the maintenance of leaves and trees falling or limbs or other bad things—maybe they’ve taken trees down in the past? Yeah, I mean, there’s a wild difference of opinions.”

What $1.2 million in tree money gets you. Credit: Cuyahoga County

Besides the historic neglect the city had in the late 20th century for its grated trees, as the 2021 Tree Plan showed, the deeper problem of restoring the canopy to a level Clevelanders can be proud of deals with a tough navigation between private and public property.

The city cannot and does not plant on private land. Tree-planting incentive programs have existed for the better part of the past decade, which often offer planting and maintenance gratis—yet these are the best bets for City Hall to convince neighbors that the benefits outweigh having to rake a little more.

There are innumerable benefits, after all: Higher tree canopies help lower rates of heart disease and asthma, help combat high summer temps on street level, help raise land values when planted strategically.

And strategy, at least in the Tree Plan guidebook, means planting saplings with an equity planner’s lens: on streets and tree lawns in Lee-Miles, in Jefferson and Clark-Fulton, where tree canopy coverage is a third of what it is in leafier neighborhoods.

“I think that the geospatial data bears out that we cannot street tree our way into a restored tree canopy,” McGowan said.

“And it shades an area of our communities that are important when you’re walking around,” she added. “But if we planted a tree in every tree lawn in the county, I still don’t think we solve our tree canopy issue.”

A solution, both McGowan and Cierebiej, admitted that could also stem from more accurate data. The last full-on tree count of Cuyahoga’s stock—which was by satellite image—is five years old.

“I think Mary and I are in agreement in order to continue this program, it’s probably time to assess it,” McGowan said, “so we can make sure that we’re targeted in how we use public funding for trees.”