WA program that pays to plant trees in Tacoma, elsewhere faces elimination
On Wednesday morning, Mike Carey, urban forest program manager for the city of Tacoma, was sitting in a meeting when he was notified of a budget proposal by the state House appropriations committee to zero out state funding for urban forestry programs.
Not a budget cut, an elimination.
Since then, he’s been trying to figure out exactly what that would mean for Tacoma.
“We are definitely worried about the consequences of this,” Carey told The News Tribune on Friday.
Tacoma’s urban forestry program builds and expands forests and green spaces around the city. The program began picking up steam in the early 2000s and, in 2010, developed a comprehensive plan that directly linked urban forestry and the benefit of trees to the health of the community.
“We know in Tacoma that we hold in our true value the benefit of our urban tree canopies, directly resulting in positive outcomes for our community members,” Carey said. “We also know that members of our community who don’t have healthy tree canopies have negative health consequences as a result of that. We put the programs in the parts of our community that need them the most.”
Earlier this week, the appropriations committee proposed budget cuts to the Washington State Department of Natural Resources that would eliminate urban forestry programs statewide.
The House’s budget proposal is an attempt to remedy a challenging 2025-27 budget cycle, with a projected deficit in the billions. Legislators have attributed the projected deficit to falling revenues from slowing sales and real estate taxes, and increasing service costs.
Potential impacts to urban forestry programs
In 2024, the Washington State Urban and Community Forestry Program awarded five Tacoma projects $1.3 million out of the $8 million awarded statewide. Tacoma’s urban forestry program has city projects in motion that are relying on a $335,000 grant from the Washington State Urban and Community Forestry Program, but now those projects could be in jeopardy.
“Dozens of communities from Seattle to Spokane would be affected,” Will Rubin, communications manager for the state Department of Natural Resources, told The News Tribune over the phone. “But Pierce County is one of the most active communities we’ve worked with. Certainly in Western Washington, if not the whole state.”
The House’s proposed budget cuts would endanger millions of dollars in federal grant funding to the Department of Natural Resources, funding which is passed through to communities like the city of Tacoma. Programs from city partners like The Tacoma Tree Foundation, which benefit from the Urban and Community Forestry grant program, would suffer.
The Tacoma Tree Foundation’s Safe Tree Routes to School program, which plants trees along known school walking routes to offer barriers from traffic and shade from the sun, officially broke ground last week. Now its future is in jeopardy.
“In the absence of that grant fund,” Carey said, “we really have to figure out what the future of that program is. And I don’t have a good answer for what that looks like.”
Lowell Wyse, executive director of The Tacoma Tree Foundation, said the possibility of the Department of Natural Resources’ funding being cut severely restricts the way resources flow into communities for climate resilience, specifically around tree planting in Tacoma’s most vulnerable neighborhoods.
“The funding that has come through from the federal government over the past couple of years is tied to environmental justice outcomes,” he said. “We had to make the case for those grants that we were affecting environmental justice in a positive way. And 100% of the funding we get from the Department of Natural Resources goes to environmental justice.”
One good example of what Wyse is talking about is the heat dome event of 2021, where temperatures in the Pacific Northwest rose up to 30 degrees above normal from late June to mid-July.
“If you were to look at a map of where the deaths and heat illnesses were located during that time, and then look at the map of tree cover, then another map of income inequality, you’re going to be looking at pretty similar, if not the same, maps,” Rubin says.
The federal projects now being threatened at the state level were originally threatened in January 2025 by the Trump administration when it froze federal funding for forestry programs previously authorized by Congress during the Biden Administration.
“These grants had the words ‘environmental justice’ written all over them, which made them a target last year of the federal government. But the funding eventually came through,” Wyse said.
As for an explanation of why the state is proposing the budget cut now, Rubin and Wyse found none.
“We haven’t received an explanation,” Rubin said. “We certainly didn’t expect it. It’s not something that was being talked about. I first heard about it when it showed up in the budget earlier this week.”
“I’m in complete shock,” Wyse added. “I know that state budgets are tricky. But I never thought there would be one proposed that would eliminate our ability to receive federal money.”
House leader offers insight
House majority leader Joe Fitzgibbon told The News Tribune on Friday that the House has been hearing a lot of concern about the proposed budget cut from the Department of Natural Resources, as well as from the cities and communities that rely on urban forestry grant programs.
“That’s why it’s not a final budget,” Fitzgibbon said. “It’s definitely something we’re hearing about and are concerned about, and we’re going to take another look at it when we get into negotiations with the Senate.”
The House will vote on the budget Saturday, Feb. 28, and then negotiations with the Senate will start. Rep. Fitzgibbon, D-West Seattle, estimates the negotiations will take about a week.
As for the trees, Tacoma has been playing catch-up. A 2018 study of tree canopies in the PNW region found that Tacoma had the lowest coverage, resulting in an urban forest management plan to raise Tacoma’s tree canopy from 20% to 30% by 2030.
According to Wyse, it can take a generation for tree investments to pay off because trees grow so slowly.
“When it comes to trees, a setback can really set a city back for a long time,” he said. “This budget cut would be a huge step backward because what we’ve been doing has been working.”
If the House’s proposal makes the final budget, the cuts would take effect July 1, 2026.
This story was originally published February 28, 2026 at 5:00 AM with the headline "WA program that pays to plant trees in Tacoma, elsewhere faces elimination."
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