Calculating A Goal For Reforestation of Durham NC

The amount of money allocated for urban forestry by elected officials in Durham NC, where I live, is sufficient to plant, nurture and maintain 350-400 trees per year, only if residents and volunteers contribute additional treasure and sweat.

That’s only a little more than the number of trees needed each and every day just to replace the number of trees our community loses to development in order to sustain the economic, public health and environmental benefits a tree canopy yields to a community.

To put this into further perspective, New York City, which has roughly the same land area as Durham County (304.8 vs. 290 square miles not including water surface,) including the Borough of Queens which covers approximately the same land area as the City of Durham (109.2 vs 94.6 sm,) plants 8,000 trees a year, 2,000 street trees alone.

Durham makes the mistake many communities do when it limits urban forestry to just those on City-owned or maintained property such as parks and right-of-ways.  Places such as New York understand that urban forest management includes a community’s entire tree canopy.

Waiting for the next public budget hearings to get Durham on track will be much too late.  Priorities are being established with the City management right now and they have customarily resulted in targets for each department and division that focus on being the same or lower than the previous year.

If you are like me, you hope that elected officials and administrators are looking strategically at the needs of the community, using “best practices” and scientific studies as aids to help develop a budget to meet those needs and communicate it to the general public.

But in reality, their limited resources are fully absorbed by the task of figuring out how to divide up the pie and juggle priorities.

This is how our street maintenance got so far behind that we had to pass bonds to catch up.  Streets aren’t the only type of infrastructure – gray, brown and green – that was allowed to degrade and it would have been far less expensive to incrementally maintain each and every year.

So many services in Durham have fallen so far below “best practice” that people have forgotten what those benchmarks are or have settled into the routine of just cutting or adding a certain percentage.  So something such as urban forest management doesn’t even come up for review as a resource or infrastructure to maintain, only a cost.

Following an in-depth urban forest resource analysis in 2007, New York City set a goal of planting a million trees during the current decade or in other words to increase its tree canopy of 5.2 million trees by 20%.  They have already reached 612,000 trees and counting.

Per year that breaks down into planting approximately 20,000 additional or replacement street trees, 30,000 trees planted by residents or private partners, 48,000 trees planted by Parks, Storm Water and other agencies as well as reforestation required by zoning regulations.

The NYC goals also focus on biodiversity and native species, not just the number of trees planted.  I am sure it includes a heart to heart with big box nurseries and residents about what constitutes native and the size trees must be able to reach to truly generate economic, health and environmental return.

Durham’s vaunted street tree canopies that contribute so much to the sense-of-place and property values in its historic neighborhoods are aging out.  People who take these lush canopies for granted need only peruse photos taken before 1930 to see how Spartan the community once looked.

Here is my first pass at some of the facts Durham needs to consider in setting its own goals for urban forestation:

• County-wide, Durham has 11.2 million trees in its urban forest.  Net those that may have naturally regenerated, we’ve surrendered 1 million trees to impervious surface in the last 30 years or so.

 

• Part of any urban forestry goal for Durham should be to gradually replace the million trees lost during those years – replanting, nurturing and maintaining, for example, 91 trees a day over the next 30 years.

 

• Based on forecasts, net those trees that will naturally regenerate, Durham also needs to plant or incentivize the replanting of 152 trees per day to replace those that are forecast to be surrendered to additional development or impervious surface over the next 30 years.

 

• A zero-loss strategy then would be to reforest 243 trees a day (88,695 per year) through a variety of means including ordinance requirements, incentives to residents and other private property owners and by public agencies such as storm water, parks, public works, public health, urban forestry etc.

 

• Remember, I am suggesting that this be phased over 30 years, not trying to duplicate the ambitious goal of a million trees in a decade that was set in NYC, and it nets out those trees that may naturally regenerate and even the nurturing of those could be incentivized.

 

• This should all begin with an an urban forest resource assessment and valuation of the entire City and County, similar to the one NYC commissioned.

I am sure there are other ways to calibrate a goal for reforestation of Durham.  I’ll happily share the metrics behind the goals shown in this blog, but another approach could be to index the amount reinvested in reforestation or afforestation to the proven dollar benefits of overall urban tree canopy, such as those so thoroughly documented for NYC.

One thing is for certain, yielding annual benefits worth $2.3 billion,  Durham’s tree canopy is a resource well worth managing to its fullest potential.

Solid Waste Recovery Since “The Summer of Love”

I didn’t make it to 1967’s “Summer of Love.”  I was a little more than 700 miles east of the “Haight” that summer following my first year of college working on the back of a county garbage truck, trying my best to pick up and empty cans like the one shown in the image in this blog without dismounting or the truck stopping.

Forty-five years later, it seems that I’m still in the solid waste business, as I try to juggle various items that remain ineligible for curbside pickup, such as batteries, paint and plastic bags. My options are to either drop them off to retailers who recycle them or take them myself to various collection points when pickups are scheduled 3 to 4 times each year.

Since distributing 95 lb. roll-out recycling carts to each household a few years ago, Durham, NC, where I live, has nearly tripled its City recycling rate which is now 360% higher than the worldwide average for urban areas and more than 260% above the national average.

My friends among the 11,000 households in unincorporated portions of Durham, 80% of which also have curbside recycling contracted for by the County, were eager to trade in their old 18 lb. carry-out-bin versions this year when they learned the big roll-out carts were included in the Durham County strategic plan only to learn the larger carts were nixed by management at the last minute.

Administrators are now working feverishly to find ways to get the big roll-out carts back into the next budget so they can meet the pent-up demand and triple the recycling rate in that part of the county, as well as realize the savings that will result from diverting an additional 652 tons of recyclables away from landfills each year, which probably didn’t figure into the decision to cut them out of the budget this year.

Next month, November 15th is America Recycles Day and as a single-person household I’ve been conducting a personal assessment of how much recyclable plastic wrap I generate.  I’m talking about the wrappers for dry cleaning, shopping bags, shipping bubbles etc.

My curiosity was peaked several months ago when I noticed that Regency/White Star Dry Cleaners and retailers such as Target now offer to recycle this type of plastic, probably in part because it is not yet eligible for curbside recycling in Durham.

It turns out that every four days, I fill one of those very large carry-out bags used by places such as Target and Bed Bath and Beyond with recyclable plastic wrap, far more than the amount of trash I generate each week.

Years ago I realized that I was segregating batteries and handheld electronics from the trash but never seemed to remember to take them to quarterly collection events sponsored by the City.

So I use a postage paid iRecycle Kit from Battery Solutions.  I get the one that holds 12 lbs. and it lasts me a year.  Businesses use trash-can- size versions and some facilities such as American Tobacco Complex, in downtown Durham, have the sleeve of the container branded for their facility.

One might wonder why I spend $34.95 to recycle 12 lbs. of batteries each year.  One reason is that it is convenient.  A more important reason is that I assumed this expense when I purchased devises that require batteries with the understanding that the manufacturer and retailer are neglecting to incorporate this cost in the price to me or the eventual cost to the environment.

In a truly effective free market, the cost of disposing of the batteries would have been incorporated into the cost I paid for the device; but in our current marketplace, these costs are passed on as externalities to consumers and ultimately taxpayers.

This is the justification behind the market-oriented, beverage container deposits that began to emerge in many states in the early 1970s about the time I graduated from college.

The companies that bottle and retailers that sell the beverages whined that the deposit requirement would lower sales and disrupt the free market while avoiding mention that the market neglected to incorporate the costs the containers ring up on society.

Those that complained hoped that consumers wouldn’t realize they were paying anyway in the form of taxes to fund litter clean up, solid waste removal and landfills.

Studies conducted in the decades that followed revealed that the impact on sales was nil but the deposit laws reduced the volume of beverage container litter between 79% and 83% and the overall amount of solid waste by 8%.  The deposit laws also spawned the innovation of reverse vending machines such as those I saw on a recent cross-country trip, manufactured by Tomra.  Click here to see how it works.

While the lobbyists for manufacturers and retailers for beverages still resisted taking responsibility, much as they are doing today with limitations on portion sizes to curb obesity, the beverage container deposit laws turned these businesses into major advocates for curbside recycling which has expanded more than 500% nationwide from just 6.6% participation in 1970.

We all need to become more aware, especially those who are so opposed to taxes, that the size of government is driven in part by the failure of the private sector to account for the full cost of the goods and services it produces as well as our failure as consumers to accept accountability for what we purchase.

Now about those aircraft carriers being used free of charge to keep shipping lanes open?

Remediation Marketing

Until I got to junior high school, it seemed that teachers would always mispronounce my name. Reyn (pronounced like Wren) came out as Reen, Roon, Rain, Run, Ryne etc.

It was embarrassing to correct them but not nearly as embarrassing as it is to call someone or something familiar by the wrong name which, however, doesn’t appear to phase flight attendants.

I can’t remember where I was actually headed at the time but I do remember feeling very chagrined to learn as I was buckling into my seat that I had mistakenly boarded a plane for Detroit.

Fortunately, it was one of those airports at the time where passengers for several flights fed into one jet-way before dividing off into paths to different airplanes, so I didn’t have far to go to correct my mistake.

That must be one reason flight attendants always announce the destination prior to closing the door to a commercial flight, such as one did yesterday, by announcing Raleigh-Durham International Airport before a flawless non-stop flight back home from Florida to Durham, North Carolina, where I live.

Unfortunately, that was the last time on that flight that the attendant or the pilot accurately identified our destination.  They gave us the flight time instead as “Raleigh,” the weather as “Raleigh,” the gate as “Raleigh” and even wished us a nice visit in “Raleigh” or wherever our destination might be.

They were trying to flatter us as you would by referring to someone by name but there is only one problem.  The plane wasn’t landing in Raleigh and only a small share of the passengers were headed there.  The weather sensor isn’t even located in Raleigh.

I stopped as I deplaned and whispered to one of the attendants a suggestion that would improve that flight in the future, “please don’t refer to this airport or the destinations it serves as “Raleigh” and gave her the reasons why.

Her initial response was “that’s just the way we do it!”  I smiled as I was turning away and I replied, “that’s fine, I still love flying Jetwest” and smiling in return she called out to me “I’ll make that suggestion to the lead attendant, but what should we call it?”

I answered, “RDU or Raleigh-Durham International Airport.”

When I first relocated to Durham during my now-concluded career in community-destination marketing, my job involved reversing any touch point where Durham’s identity or Durham assets were being compromised, including references to the airport which is jointly owned by Durham and Raleigh, but is actually located midway between the two cities in Morrisville, NC.

A core but often overlooked principle of community-destination marketing is that a dollar’s worth of “remediation marketing” is worth a million dollars of promotion.

Truncating the name of the airport to simply “Raleigh” was common back when I arrived in Durham to jump-start Durham community marketing, not only in so-called regional meetings, many held at the airport but in news articles, board meetings at the local Chamber of Commerce, news releases by the State Division of Tourism and even utterances by elected officials.

A man with a business in nearby Chapel Hill, who must have lived in Durham City or County or Raleigh or one of a dozen towns in Wake County or he wouldn’t have been appointed to the RDU Airport Authority, wrote a scathing and very personally defaming letter castigating me for requesting accurate references to the airport.

I shared the letter and my reply with my board members so they could cover my back.  Unbeknownst to me, the letter had been courtesy copied widely and it came to the attention of the late and great Dr. John Hope Franklin at Duke University, with whom I was not yet acquainted.

I had forgotten about the letter when, a few weeks later, I attended a large banquet where Dr. Franklin was to speak.  I was stunned when in his first words after being introduced Dr. Franklin asked me by name to stand while he described my still relatively new role and responsibilities in the community.

Saying nothing else about me, he then launched into a funny story about how he always corrected flight attendants and pilots who try to take him to “Raleigh.”  Then with a quick “thanks” he nodded for me to sit down.

Over the next two decades, I would still get plenty of attitude from some folks in Raleigh whenever I performed this very small part of my job, but far more often people would come up to me and ask, “tell me how to correct flight attendants the way Dr. John Hope Franklin does!”

Making It Hard To Remain A Moderate

I subscribe to a quote, written by the conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr., as a litmus test for anyone I encounter who still purports that there is any value in increasingly obsolete, outdoor, roadside billboards.

To anyone still advocating for billboards, I suspect the acerbic Buckley would quip, oh, “do you have one in your front yard?”, as he wrote in an essay in his 1968 collection entitled The Jeweler's Eye: A Book of Irresistible Political Reflections.”

Buckley, who passed away in 2008, famously wrote in that same essay, “billboards are acts of aggression, against which the public is entitled, as a matter of privacy, to be protected.”

In the essay entitled “The Politics of Beauty,” Buckley challenges anyone owning or advertising on roadside billboards “to construct (one) facing his own homestead rather than the public highway, in order to remind him, every time he looks out his window…certainly should be left free to do so.”

There may be an exception, but billboard company execs don’t like to live in neighborhoods with or near billboards.  Fearing backlash from neighbors they usually reserve the big boards for poorer neighborhoods instead.

In the essay, Buckley also challenged Libertarians, the most conservative of conservatives to take on what he saw as an abuse of the argument for the principle of private property by billboard companies.  Often billboard companies buy or lease property to erect a billboard that is behind a grove of pre-existing roadside trees and then apply for a permit to cut them down, arguing the right to be seen.

In my opinion, billboard companies are not really free marketers, they are more like freeloaders, paying little in fees and less than the cost of a couple of steak dinners in annual property taxes.  They weasel out of compensating the public for the trees they destroy, if not exempted entirely such as was done for them by recent legislation passed in North Carolina.

Most egregious is the fact that they pay nothing for the scenic easements they destroy.  Economists view these companies as rent seeking because rather than creating value, they use campaign contributions and lobbying to secure gratuities along public roadways that they didn’t pay to create.

Courts call this parasitic, but lawmakers seemingly blinded by cash and strong-armed in the hallways of the legislature, have yet to prioritize the electorate’s right to a view of nature along public roadways.

I am a moderate and an Independent but I miss Buckley and the thought-provoking stimulation of his essays in the National Review as well as the wit he exhibited during interviews on his long-running television talk show, Firing Line.

To me Buckley represented the now nearly extinct traditional conservatives so eloquently described a few days ago in a column in the New York Times by David Brooks entitled The Conservative Mind.

Brooks laments that “conservatism has lost the balance between economic and traditional conservatism. The Republican Party has abandoned half of its intellectual ammunition. It appeals to people as potential business owners, but not as parents, neighbors and citizens.”

Ironically, Buckley and Russell Kirk, who are credited with giving form to modern conservatism following World War II, and the late President Reagan who also represented a more diverse and thoughtful conservatism, might be excommunicated by today’s conservatives.

One thing is for sure: Locked in “polarized political conflict with liberalism” as Brooks writes and with seeming disdain for mutual respect or the common good, those who dominate today’s conservatism make it incredibly difficult to remain a moderate.

However, whenever I find myself tempted to tune out today’s robotic conservatives and shift away from my moderate comfort zone, I reread the Ten Conservative Principles by the late Russell Kirk, who lived in Durham, NC, where I now live, in the 1940s as a graduate student at Duke University and whose 1953 Ph.D. dissertation “The Conservative Mind – From Burke to Eliot” was published as a book.

If you are a liberal or a moderate like I am, or a conservative who is dismayed by today’s robotic brand of conservatism, reading Buckley and Kirk is a way to regain perspective and appreciation and understanding for the best in that ideology.

Stripper Economics and Mega-Event Hype

Strip club owners in Tampa, FL and Charlotte, NC, where the two major political party conventions were held recently, revealed a lesson in economic impact in a piece I heard my NPR affiliate recently that alluded to a rule of economic impact that would be instructive for powerful political and business interests bent on ego-driven pursuit of mega-events, aka “Big Game Hunting.”

Mega-events displace as much or more in resident and visitor consumption as they generate.

In fact, according to strip club economics they definitely generate a loss due both to misguided renovations fueled by absurdly unrealistic expectations and even more so from the loss of regulars who stay home rather than navigate the hassles (in these two cases, it was not only increased traffic but elaborate security) created by the event and felt as much as seven miles away from any venue.

I saw this with my own eyes during the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, when I was doing some preliminary scouting on behalf of Alaska, where I then worked in destination marketing, for what eventually became a successful effort to win the nomination as America’s choice for the 1992 Winter Games before losing out to Albertville, France and probably dodging the proverbial bullet.

The seed of my suspicion about mega-events was planted when it was so easy to find last minute hotel rooms and restaurant reservations in LA during an otherwise extremely successful Olympics.  This was confirmed by reports from Atlanta in 1996 and comments from bewildered retailers during a 1999 mega-event that, even though this was inconvenient to the participants, was spread over dozens of cities and towns and three counties including Durham, where I live.

I am not exactly sure when during my now-concluded forty-year career in community-destination marketing that I began to collect studies and clippings about the real impact of mega-events.

I also attribute much of my informal education about the vagaries of mega-events to generous tutoring from researchers and economists such as Dave Dittman in Anchorage as well as Mike Walden, Larry Gustke, Gene Brothers, Larry Long and Mitch Javidi both during and after their tenures at NC State University.

Ultimately, though, beginning in 1999, the economist who really helped me drill down into mega-events using very reliable input-output economic impact methodology was Ken McGill, then with Global Insight and now managing director of Rockport Analytics where a few months ago he performed an incredibly, in-depth analysis of the Super Bowl held last February in Indianapolis, which was the best by far that I’ve ever read.

It is best for host cities (and states) as well as the NFL to commission independent impact analysis.  Indianapolis is wisely using the post-event report as the basis for future decisions.

Unfortunately, most communities that are addicted to “Big Game Hunting” usually let far too many egos get attached before they seek economic impact estimates and then, instead of using them to inform open-minded decisions, these estimates are almost always sought purely as justification.

I was fortunate that the last decade of my career overlapped with Ken’s 30 years in economic and market research.  He was always patient in explaining the answers to my barrage of questions and he shared with me a 2001 op-ed piece in which Dr. Philip Porter, an economics professor at the University of South Florida, unwrapped how and why the impact promoted by organizers for the Super Bowl that year didn’t make any sense.

Porter pointed out the pitfalls involved with “using long-run models to predict the impact of a short-duration event.”  Because of how sales tax reporting is done, it is also very difficult to look at sales over the specific days of the event and compare them to the same days the year before and after.

It is now further complicated because the NFL asks for many expenditures to be tax free during the Super Bowl period.  Porter did his analysis by looking at sales reported for the month previous to when other Super Bowls were held and compared these to the collections for that month, the year prior and the year after hosting a Super Bowl.

The impact was nil.  Like the political conventions just held, events this big literally displace as much visitor and resident impact as they generate.  There may be a lot of reasons to host such an event, but if communities want to be assured of the economic value-added necessary to recoup the tax dollars required, they are best advised to eschew “Big Game Hunting” in favor of smaller events and visitor segments that augment rather than displace.

Even the vaunted “halo” effect that is used to justify hosting mega-events is over-hyped and must be weighed against the exposure the underwriting required could generate in more sustainable promotions.  A classic study in Sweden after a decade of hosting mega-events showed negligible impact on community image.

This may not assuage egos, but the safer alternative of focusing on smaller events and other visitor segments is always far better for the bottom line while greatly minimizing any risk of tax dollars.  While the Rockport report for Indianapolis is a “best practice” and documents any displacement of tourism, economists are still trying to find ways to fully account for displacement of resident spending and retained tourism.

Clearly though, Rockport’s report for Indianapolis illustrates that both the NFL and host cities are much better served when the Super Bowl is held in regions where it will occur during low season, a lesson that applies as well for other mega-events.