Rigonomics:

I have never been known to be a tree hugger. I am what you might call a bottom-line business type. But making sure we have trees in our community, and especially our parkways — that 5-foot strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street — makes a lot of sense to me.

An environmentalist might tell you that the value of the trees is that they absorb the carbon dioxide in the air. CO2 is that very deadly greenhouse gas that comes from people exhaling. Others might say that trees shade our streets and sidewalks from heat. Their shade cools our homes in the summer and helps us save energy on air conditioning.

In addition to all that, trees add value to our homes and neighborhoods. I do not mean esoteric value; I am talking about “cash on the barrelhead when you buy or sell a home” kind of value. The older and more mature a tree is, the more value it brings.

Nothing looks better than a tree-lined street. Home buyers love a tree-lined street and are willing to pay more for a house that sits on one. One of the good things about our city getting older is that our trees are becoming more mature and more valuable.

Driving through the city, there seems to be a lot of homes missing trees. So at Monday night’s Planning Commission meeting we asked to have a presentation by Bruce Hartley, who is maintenance service manager for the city of Costa Mesa, to discuss the state of trees in our city.

The information he gave us was a bit disturbing.

A little background here: As with most cities, when a home is built there is a requirement to plant a tree in the parkway in front of the home. Since we became a city, in 1953, with few exceptions, there has been a tree planted for each residence. The parkway is owned by the city, but maintained by the property owner.

When a property owner wants to remove a tree in the parkway, they must get permission from the city. If the city’s criteria for removing a tree are not met, the decision can be appealed to the Parks and Recreation Commission. Their responsibility is to make rulings on which trees can be removed and what kind of mitigation should be done to replace the tree.

To be fair, very few cities have this type of procedure in place to save and replace trees.

And let’s be fair. With all their benefits, trees do sometimes cause problems. The lifting of sidewalks and clogging of sewer pipes are the main reasons that homeowners want trees removed. Another is the mess they make when they shed their leaves, pods or seeds.

However, there are new techniques for planting trees with growth barriers to stop the roots from lifting sidewalks and clogging sewer pipes. But no, we haven’t figured out how to have trees pick up after themselves.

Here is the disturbing fact: The city has 31,265 places where a tree should be, yet we have only 22,522 trees planted. That means we are 8,743 trees short in our city. We have data on every tree that is on city property. I asked Hartley how much it would cost to replace every one of those missing trees. He said it was about $95 per tree, or a total of $830,585, if we planted every missing tree.

Trees, like a good investment, go up in value every year as they mature. The sooner you plant them, the sooner they add value to our community. Planting trees is like making compound interest on a bank deposit. As trees grow, their value compounds.

That $830,585 may seem like a lot of money, but to a city with an Operating and Capital budget of more than $117 million, it is noise to the bottom line. This is only 7/10 of 1% of the 2009-10 budget. The reason we do not have a budget to replace trees is that it is not a budget priority. Even when the city was in good financial shape, we did not budget money to replace all the missing trees.

The question I always ask when making a business decision is not how much it costs, but how much is it worth? Planting trees now will only add value to our neighborhoods. For very little cost today we can have a lot of value tomorrow.

I realize that these may be financially difficult times for the city. But even in these tough times, we need a budget plan to replace the missing trees sooner rather than later. It is always a good time to make a good investment for the future.

JIM RIGHEIMER is chairman of the Costa Mesa Planning Commission, local business owner and a father of four. He can be reached at jim@rigonomics.com.