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CITY OF PLEASANTON URBAN FOREST MASTER PLAN | 93 URBAN FOREST MANAGEMENT PRACTICES the shared experience of tree planting within the community and reaching a common goal. Depending on the year, the City will aim to give away approximately 100 trees annually to the community in these target neighborhoods to reach the canopy goal. Businesses and Developer Contributions Businesses and developers can also support the City’s tree planting goal by planting and maintaining trees on their properties. Based on current development projects that are either approved or in the planning phase within the targeted neighborhoods, the City predicts that an average of 25 trees will be planted annually as part of the project design requirements. The City estimates that on a city-wide basis, developers have planted close to 200 trees per year on average due to requirements of their development plan process. Currently, this data is not consistently tracked as part of the urban forestry program, and collecting this data in the future will allow the City to better track progress towards their city-wide canopy cover goal, and better understand the annual contributions from development projects to tree canopy. Management Pathway and Projected Budget Summary Given the assumptions above which include the City filling 1,106 vacant tree sites, giving out a total of 2,500 trees to residents in target neighborhoods, and developers planting a total of 625 trees over the next 25 years, this still leaves 2,076 trees to be planted across the 26 neighborhoods. Different strategies are discussed below which will impact the actualized cost for the City, but to simplify the budget model, we have projected the cost for the City to create the remaining 2,076 new tree sites in these neighborhoods which are needed to meet the canopy cover goal. In addition to the new trees planted, this budget model also accounts for the City maintaining its standard tree services such as removing and replanting an average of 175 dead trees per year, watering and structurally pruning newly planted trees as part of a three- year establishment program and pruning an average of 4,670 mature trees per year to maintain a five-year pruning cycle. Based on these assumptions, the City would need to spend an estimated $61.6 million over the 25-year timeline, ranging from roughly $1.2 million annually at year one to $3.2 million annually at year 25, to achieve the canopy goal (Figure 1-1). While the year one projection is roughly equal in cost to the current average annual spending on the urban forestry program, as more trees are planted and needing to be maintained, the year 25 funding needed represents an estimated difference of over $1.2 million from the City’s current budget, even when considering a three percent inflation adjustment. This would necessitate that the City identify potential future funding sources (see Appendix E)