Spring blooms along West Front Street at the entrance to Riverside Gardens Park last week. (Click to enlarge)
The Red Bank Shade Tree Committee hopes to plant 200 new trees in the borough over the next five years, according to an action plan filed with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection last week.
Also among the objectives of the Community Forestry Management Plan: complete an ongoing inventory of every tree not on private property.
The Shade Tree Committee’s tree inventory is online at Googe Maps.
Finishing the inventory is not a major challenge, says STC secretary Boris Kofman. It’s nearly done and viewable at Google Maps with only trees in Count Basie Fields, Marine Park and Riverside Gardens Park remaining to be included.
But getting new trees into the ground is a more hit-and-miss process. The STC gets no direct funding from the borough, and has had to rely on other agencies to help it acquire specimens.
This year, the borough Environmental Commission donated some of its funds to play for three threes, and Monmouth County has pledged to plant eight more.
The last big push for new trees yielded a tree-planting blitz in 2007.
But Kofman says the report, filed with the DEP’s Forestry Service, will enable the borough to qualify for approved status, and thus, grant money.
It’s also about giving visibility to the STC’s work, he says.
“Basically, we want to have a guideline of what we’re going to be doing for the next five years,” Kofman says. “It’s a public document, and hopefully it will get included in the master plan.”
Here’s the full plan: red-bank-forestry-plan-2011
