City Trees

Board Member Profile: Dorothy Abeyta 16 CityTREES Dorothy Abeyta graduated from the University of California-Riverside in 1977 with an MS in Plant Pathology. She worked for 20 years as a diag- nostician, first for a commercial firm in Southern California for a decade, and then as a freelance consulting plant pathologist. Of self-employment she says, "Working for myself from home for ten years while my kids were little was great, because it afforded me more time with them." As a consultant, she specialized in plant health of trees and turfs, working with municipalities, nurs- eries, landscapers, and landscape architects. Her trees and turf specialty set her up to be recruited in 2001 by the City of San José, who had been a client of hers, to be their Assistant Arborist. Within a year she was promoted to San José Arborist for Special Districts, overseeing the high-end landscape areas in the city. "When I started, there were three of us in the dis- tricts, doing everything from determining assessments for residents to overseeing tree maintenance," she says. "When I retired from the job in 2016, the staff had grown to eight." Abeyta enjoyed her work in San José, but the commute to the Bay Area had become a killer: two hours of commuting on a good day, three to four hours on a bad day. For many years Abeyta and her husband had commuted to San José together, but when he passed away in 2012, she was no longer able to use the car pool lanes—and the commute time doubled. "Plus I had lost my commuting buddy, someone to talk to," she says. When Davey Resource Group (DRG) Vice President & General Manager Jack McCabe found out that Abeyta was retiring from her position at San José, he said, "We want you!" DRG had done work with San José, so Abeyta was well known to the company. She is now the DRG Project Developer for California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. (If that sounds like an unwieldly territory, it rather is! The thriving company is currently restructuring and Abeyta's region will be more targeted.) As Project Developer, Abeyta talks to clients to find out what their urban forestry programs are like and where the strengths and gaps are. "I put together a team of DRG folks to help them build a better program," she says. "It could be that the municipality's data is poor and they need a com- plete re-inventory, or perhaps the data is good but they need a better management system for their trees, or even are ready for a master plan." Sometimes communities don't have a full- time city arborist, so Abeyta will recommend they put someone in contractually, part-time, to help fill that gap, and she'll even help with the recruitment and interview process. Abeyta also does grant writing for communi- ties, at little to no cost to them. "I enjoy grant writing because I'm good at it and as a project developer, I know how to put all the pieces together," she says. "The one challenging part can be whether the municipality or non- profit can get their budget to align with their goals. For instance, if they don't feel they have enough internal funding to do a grant match of any kind, I'll encourage them to find ways to get that 0% up to a 15 or 20%, because I know from experience that's what will make the grant application more likely to succeed."

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