The Community Forestry Commission (pdf) is holding an open house session on Tuesday September 12 from 7 to 9 PM. I am not sure there is much to gain but if a few good people wish to attend. Maybe you can also email your suggestions? So many of our previous suggestions have been totally ignored it's hard to persist but what else is there to do? All my best wishes to the people who want to attend. If someone wants to take a digital mp3 recorder contact me and I'll lend you one.
If you want to look at how your tax money is spent you can read the report produced (pdf) (at what cost? with what result?) that states that the canopy coverage in Winslow core is/was 29% and documents the lack of any significant tree protection policy. Of course the authors did not go as far as to document the number of trees lost during the recent years. That would have been biting the hand that fed them.
As usual with the City the important documents are not available in a format easy to use (pdf is not userfriendly) and no comments are permitted by this format. I had suggested years ago that the City adopts a blog format to record the meetings of the various commissions and especially the community forestry commission but obviously that would have brought too much transparency. Therefore "communication" remains glued to late hours meetings that many people cannot attend, there is no serious effort to make any significant information easily available to the citizenry.
The citizenry that cares about trees can only hope to grow enough leverage by getting much better organized itself, preferrably within an existing strong environmental organization, like (for instance) the Sierra Club.
I have no doubt that an active local group of the Sierra Club with strong internet presence provided by a set of volunteers sharing the workload of watching what the city is up to would be effective.
To this date, the historical Association of Bainbridge Communities that brings together a substantial number of local adovcates has "managed" to avoid having any internet presence despite several offers on my part to help them create a blog.
They remain devoted to the exclusive and episodic production of a paper based Scotchbroom whose distribution is stable (or declining?) while our population is growing.
That is not the type of leadership needed in the 21st century but -as often- certain people prefer continue to act as they are used to rather than trying new, more effective strategies.