Indianapolis needs to spend money to preserve urban forests

We are looking for a meaningful commitment to preserve Indianapolis' few remaining urban forests and grow Indy Parks’ greenspace inventory for our citizens.

Through Special Resolution 21, the City-County Council wants to get a strategic land acquisition program up and running. Preserving urban forests checks off so many boxes toward meeting the city’s sustainability goals.

Our hope is to secure seed money in the 2025 budget to identify and acquire strategic urban woodlands within Marion County. While the Indiana Forest Alliance has initially identified four urban forest parcels in the city with an estimated market value of approximately $6 million, we appreciate that would be very challenging to do in the 2025 budget. We are focused on arriving at a lesser amount to get the program off the ground.

We also appreciate this is quite a challenging budget year with union contracts, including the Indianapolis Fire Department and Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, all coming up for renewal, combined with health insurance increases and built-in inflation increases in many city contracts.

We believe a meaningful commitment to preserve urban forests would be in the form of at least $2 million in seed money in the 2025 budget to kick-start efforts to secure matching funds from the philanthropic space and state and federal grant programs. This is a negligible slice of the city’s budget pie – indeed, $2 million is a mere 0.13% of a roughly $1.6 billion budget.

I urge the mayor to fund this program initially with a minimal level of seed money in the 2025 budget.

Dan Boots is a Democrat on the City-County Council.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indianapolis needs to spend money to preserve urban forests