City Trees

it's important to hire a consulting arborist, and why I am uniquely qualified." Still also shared his resume with Namm and encour- aged him to borrow ideas or elements of it that suited him. "It's been super gratifying to have someone be interested in my professional experiences and what I've learned," Still says. "And even sharing past frustrations has been reassuring to Brandon, I think. Urban forestry is a challenging field, and the work doesn't always progress smoothly the way it's laid out in textbooks." Is there one last piece of advice for folks considering the UCFS Mentoring Program in the future? Namm says, "The more open and natural your conversations can be, the better. Doug and I didn't always talk for the full hour, or sometimes our talks went longer. Occasionally we talked on the phone—like when I was in my backyard, playing with my cat. It lent itself to a less formal conversation." Namm advises trying different modes of communication and seeing what works best so that the mentor and mentee can be their most authentic selves. Grant Jones on his Experience as a Mentee Grant Jones has been the Forestry Superintendent for the Village of Oak Park, Illinois since 2021. Prior to that he worked as the Arborist for the City of Bowling Green, Ohio. I really appreciated getting matched as a mentee with mentor David Lefcourt, who is the City Arborist/ Tree Warden for Cambridge, Massachusetts. While Cambridge (pop. ~117,000) is about twice the size of Oak Park, there are similarities among our resi- dents, and some of the challenges I am facing are similar to what David has experienced in Cambridge. As the program was starting, I made a list of topics I wanted to cover. I'd bring up one or two each time we'd meet. For instance, in our current cycle pruning program, we give our contractor the list of all the trees for a year at once. This makes following their progress throughout that year's zone a bit difficult, as they some- times will jump around a bit if there are areas that are more difficult to prune. David shared that Cambridge breaks their pruning zone for a year into smaller sec- tions. This made tracking the contractor's progress easier. I liked this suggestion and incorporated it into our cycle pruning contract that went out to bid. In Oak Park we are in the process of developing our urban forest management plan. It was extremely helpful listening to David explain the process his department went through as they developed the Cambridge Urban Forest Master Plan. They looked at canopy cover and found that their canopy cover loss was due to private tree removals. Oak Park is in a similar position in that our real opportunities to increase canopy cover involve trees on private property. We've included steps to address this as we're developing our management plan. I liked that David sets up meetings with contractors each year to discuss working around trees. He devel- oped some really good guidelines for when it is ok to prune roots during a construction project. The Oak Park Water Division has a lot of water service replace- ments that they are doing. I've shared David's guidelines with my colleagues to help them understand tree roots better when they are working in the field. David and I also had a good conversation about work-life balance and how to separate what goes on at work from life outside of work. Grant Jones ucfsociety.org 21

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