It’s a new day for trees across Baltimore County.
The twist is that the man in charge of a program to plant new trees used to be the guy who chopped them down.
“It’s kind of like a Karma rebuild for myself,” said Saul Passe, the county’s urban reforestation supervisor. “I’ve been removing them for all of these years and now I’m tasked with putting them all back so it feels good.”
In the past, trees that were causing problems like breaking up sidewalks were chopped down and that was that. Now those trees are being replaced.
Passe runs the county’s ReTree program, which is planting saplings in yards in 32 lower income neighborhoods with a dearth of trees. For nearly two decades his job was to cut county trees down as the arborist for the county bureau of highways and before that as a member of the county’s tree crew.
The county sees ReTree as a way to bring the benefits of trees, like cooler streets and homes and cleaner air to neighborhoods with people who are less likely to have the money to plant saplings themselves.
The county has a goal of having 40% of its more urban areas covered by trees by 2025.
Operation ReTree is being paid for with $1.5 million from the federal American Rescue Plan Act and $400,000 in county money. It also received a $1.5 million grant from the Chesapeake Bay Trust, which is administering the state program to plant 5 million trees by 2030.
Passe said most of the trees he took down were dead. But others were removed because they were getting into sewer systems and breaking up sidewalks.
He said it’s easier to chop them down than it is to plant them.
“There are guidelines you have to follow,” Passe said. “There are people you have to be interacting with. You want to plant the tree in the right spot. You want to make sure that you’ve communicated with the public enough. Taking trees down is, you know, I put an orange dot on the tree and those are the ones I remove.”
Passe, the urban reforestation supervisor, said they have mapped out where those trees were and are replacing them.
The county has planted hundreds of trees in the Eastfield-Stanbrook neighborhood in Dundalk.
Donna Dodge is 72 years old and has lived there all her life. She remembers when the neighborhood was next to farmland.
“The cows used to run in the street,” Dodge said. “They used to get out.”
Over the decades the neighborhood’s trees were cut down due to damage done to sewer lines and sidewalks. Dodge took the county up on its offer to plant a tree in her yard. She picked out an American Hornbeam, a native tree that’s part of the birch family. It grows about one foot a year and eventually will be 20 to 40 feet tall.
“It makes the front of the house look so much nicer having a tree out there I think,” Dodge said.
Neighbor Mark Persiani scored a tree from the county too.
“People think that maybe mine’s a little close to the car,” Persiani said. “I think it’s going to provide shade for the car. And if the birds poop on my car that’s a natural thing. I’ll clean it up.”
The county has had to convince people that it can now plant trees that won’t do a number on sidewalks. When a tree is planted, a plastic barrier is put in place along the sidewalk to protect it from the roots.
Some people warm up to the idea of a free tree in their yard once they see their neighbor get one, according to Brian Lindley, forest manager at the Baltimore County Department of Environmental Protection & Sustainability.
“We’ve already come through the neighborhood,” Lindley said. “We’re working with the community organizers, the word’s already out, so it’s easy to come right back in with a postcard or something else and say ‘hey, you still have an opportunity if you want.’”
After first planting 200 trees in Eastfield-Stanbrook, there were requests for 67 more.
The county is also running a second tree planting program that targets its more urban areas.
In the past, the county also took down trees along some of its busier streets in Towson, Owings Mills, Randallstown, Dundalk, Parkville, Pikesville and Woodlawn.
“Those areas were identified,” he said. “And we’re saying we’re going into these spots and doing replacements. Not just replacements of the ones we’ve taken down, but a redo of the whole area and try to retree the whole streetscape of that area.”
The county is spending $625,000 to plant 1,300 trees in its street tree replacement program.
Property owners across Baltimore County in eligible neighborhoods can request to participate in the tree program here.