Twelve million federal dollars granted to Philadelphia’s tree canopy expansion efforts are caught in the Trump administration’s federal funding freeze, officials said at a City Council hearing on Wednesday, March 5.
Philadelphia Parks & Recreation (PPR) Commissioner Susan Slawson told Councilmember Jamie Gauthier that the department does not have access to the funds. PPR declined further comment.
The money was allotted for the city’s Tree Plan, which ambitiously aims to expand each Philadelphia neighborhood’s tree canopy to 30% in 10 years, Grid reported. It came from a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant.
The project joins a growing list of environmental departments and organizations in the region that have lost access to funds after the federal funding freeze.
Gauthier and the City Council Committee on Environment held the meeting to hear updates from PPR on the plan’s progress two years in. A three-year report card is scheduled to come out in the spring of 2026, according to the PPR city forester, Erica Smith Fichman.
The plan aims to correct the discrepancy between neighborhoods’ tree canopies that falls along socioeconomic lines. As expressed by Temple University professor and researcher Hamil Pearsall, trees are lacking in poorer communities, meaning their benefits are lacking, too. Denser tree canopies are correlated with lower crime rates, longer lifespans, less air pollution and lower temperatures, that last perk being especially important as climate change brings hotter and drier summers.
There are also ongoing efforts to build residents’ trust in the City related to street trees by being proactive rather than reactive. Residents commonly decline free street trees because they or their neighbors have had negative experiences in the past with responsibility for maintaining a tree falling to the homeowner, Gauthier says.
PPR wants to ensure that trees are maintained — especially in their crucial first years — not just upon residents’ request but on a systematic cycle, Fichman says.
While a dozen public commenters lauded the city’s goals, the historic distrust of the City’s efforts was evident. Tree planting volunteer Elaine Jenson asked the committee to stop the clear-cutting of South Philly’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) Park, which she said has undone decades of volunteer planting and maintenance and is counter to the City’s sustainability and tree canopy goals.
“It’s unconscionable what they allowed to have happen at FDR Park. Please don’t let them do any more,” Jenson says. “No more.”
