Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : On the Count of Tree : Teams Ready to Go Out and Enumerate 35,000 of Them

If a tree falls in this city, it would be a fair bet to say that, somehow, someone would hear about it. The tree-loving city of Santa Clarita is about to shell out $40,000 to take a comprehensive computerized inventory of each of its 35,000 trees.

“It’s Space Age stuff,” said John Danielson, manager of the the city’s Parks, Recreation and Community Services Department, describing the inventory process. “All these people will be standing in front of trees, with laptops.”

The City Council will vote Tuesday to approve a $39,360 contract with the Ohio-based Davey Resource Group, a division of the Davey Tree Experts Co., which specializes in “arboricultural consultation.”

“That means we go out and answer questions about trees,” said Steve Brown, project manager of Davey Resource, which has established tree inventory programs in 99 other cities. A team of Davey Resource’s arborists will be dispatched to every neighborhood in Santa Clarita to log each and every tree.

“We will collect the various diameters and heights, whether they have involvement with electrical outlets or are breaking sidewalks,” Brown said. All of this information will then be loaded into “Tree Keeper,” a database for the municipal management of trees.

“What’s neat about this is if you know the climatic conditions, you can predict when an insect infestation or the advent of anthracnose (a fungal disease) is coming,” Danielson said. With the ability to make an instant printout of every tree in the city that could be afflicted by such ailments, city workers can take preventive measures.

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In addition, should a tree be the cause of an accident, data on the tree in question can be called up easily to assess whether it had been properly maintained by the city. “Computerized organization puts the city in the modern age,” Brown said.

The entire task will take about 15 weeks to complete and will cost $1.23 per tree, city officials estimated. The city’s tree population has nearly doubled since Santa Clarita incorporated in 1987, and the city plants an additional 1,000 trees every year, Danielson said.

Until now, the city’s own two arborists have been kept a log of all trees on paper.