Instead of conducting detailed inspections and pruning every seven years, park board staff is proposing doing this every 10 years for the city’s street and park trees.
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Vancouver park board staff want to inspect the health of city trees less often, partly because they can’t keep up with new demands related to maintaining the city’s 150,000 street trees and 38,000 park trees.
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But an expert in tree risk assessment warns that while a proposal to change the manner and frequency of tree inspections could be cost-efficient, it might not be cost-effective as it could result in dangerous trees being missed.
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“It comes down to money, but you’ll miss defects in trees that cause tree parts to fail,” said Norman Oberson, a provincially certified tree risk assessor, owner of Arbutus Tree Service, and a board member of the Trees of Vancouver Society.
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Instead of conducting detailed inspections and pruning every seven years, park board staff are proposing doing this every 10 years for the city’s street and park trees.
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“For most stand-alone trees, (the proposed policy) adopts a 10-year detailed inspection cycle supplemented by annual visual inspections, balancing public safety, operational feasibility, and responsible use of public funds,” wrote the director of park operations in a report to the park board chair and commissioners ahead of a board meeting on May 4.
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According to the report, the problem with the old policy, which dates back to 1993, is that it requires pruning and inspecting in a way that yields “a fixed volume of mitigation work regardless of the findings of an individual inspection.”
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The reality is that the park board’s urban forestry department has not been able to keep up with the current requirements.
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“It equates to an obligation to prune over 21,000 street trees annually, while also attempting to address park and golf course trees, storm-related tree work, service requests, emerging priorities and conventional stewardship practices such as tree planting and watering,” the report states.
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The urban forestry department responded to 920 storm-related tree failures in 2025, which represented about 20 per cent of its work, said the report. It also has responded to over 10,000 service requests per year in recent years, “a reflection on an increasingly engaged community.”
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The city’s urban forest consists of all trees on public and private land.
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The park board is responsible for the stewardship and risk management of trees on streets, which account for about nine per cent of the city’s canopy cover, and in parks, which account for 5.5 per cent of the canopy cover. A new policy would also incorporate trees on city-owned land and laneways that account for 1.25 per cent of the city’s canopy cover.
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In addition to a longer inspection cycle for street and park trees, the city would, over 10 years, complete a detailed inspection of all stand-alone trees in a systematic way, one neighbourhood at a time.
