Skip to main content
Victoria Burton lived in dread of Heritage Tree 26.
The English elm stood on the front lawn of the home she and her husband, Delroy, owned on North Mississippi Avenue. Renting out the bungalow provided the retired couple with their primary source of income.
But in 2022, the Burtons got new, unwanted tenants: elm leaf beetles. Hundreds of the insects appeared in the house, which the couple could no longer rent out. They hired an exterminator to fumigate the place, to no avail. Their only recourse, they decided, was to cut the elm down.
But to do that, the Burtons needed the sanction of the city of Portland’s Urban Forestry program, which oversees every single tree in the city, on property both public and private. After all, the elm was a heritage tree, one of 300 trees deemed by the city to have “historical or horticultural significance.”
Urban Forestry was unmoved. The tree wasn’t dead, dying or dangerous. If it was robbing an elderly couple of their retirement, that was their bad luck.
In 2023, the Burtons took their plea to the Urban Forestry Commission, which handles arboreal disputes, including the delisting of Heritage Trees, pleading with the commissioners to take their tree off the list. The panel initially rejected their request.
It did so on the advice of city forester Jenn Cairo, who said the tree provided a valuable canopy to the neighborhood. “When one purchaser purchases a property, it’s kind of buyer beware,” Cairo said midway through the meeting. “It’s been a very large tree for a very long time and a clear feature of that property.”
That’s when Victoria Burton let the commissioners have it.
“I want all of you tonight, when you go home and you’re sleeping,” Burton said, her voice cracking, “to think about how you are pushing us out of our home because you care more about a tree than you care about a human being.”
Eight years before, in 2015, the Portland City Council launched the city’s first Tree Code: a 32,000-word document that regulates how trees in the city must be cared for and preserved.
The code, called Title 11, gave the city forester sweeping authority over the city’s trees—and over what homeowners were allowed to do with them both in city rights of way and, in many cases, on their own land.
The creation of the Tree Code, among the strictest in the nation, was well intentioned. Officials said it would protect and expand the city’s canopy amid worsening climate change. “Too many trees were being lost, period,” says former City Commissioner Amanda Fritz, who championed the code after pressure from environmental groups.
But the result is one of the most unpopular policies in the city, a set of rules so inflexible and ruthlessly enforced that at least one family says it spurred their decision to leave town.
The Tree Code has empowered a city program to police the trimming, pruning and planting of trees as if they were illicit activities: issuing civil penalties of up to $1,000 a day or $225 per inch of tree damaged for violations not swiftly corrected, threatening to serve search warrants, and denying permits to remove trees despite evidence they pose a danger to lives and property.
What’s more, Urban Forestry has become a place where one person’s word is law. Jenn Cairo, who has served as city forester since 2012, has established a reputation for caring passionately about trees, demanding authority over decisions affecting the city’s tree canopy, and showing little sympathy for the human costs of protecting wood.
Over six weeks, in more than three dozen interviews and a review of city documents spanning a decade, WW has learned the following:
- Cutting down a tree that’s over 12 inches in diameter on your own property in Portland requires the permission of Urban Forestry. It can end in denial, even if homeowners show evidence the tree could cause physical harm. And homeowners are on the hook for the cost of removing city trees adjacent to their property, which often costs more than $5,000.
- The city has deployed a team of inspectors who respond to complaints about homeowners who remove or shorten trees on their own property without permission, and can issue monthly enforcement fees to property owners who don’t correct violations. The code’s enforcers show a particular interest in “street trees”—that is, trees on city property that private citizens are financially liable to maintain—and tightly police any harm to those trees.
- Urban Forestry has developed a reputation for behaving as if it takes priority over other city bureaus and offices. In documents, city officials have alleged that Urban Forestry has thrown a wrench into reforming the city’s permitting process and has slowed the response to weather disasters. Urban Forestry denies this.
- Urban Forestry’s desire to control all the city’s tree-planting efforts, other bureaus say, has actually reduced the number of street trees the city has planted in recent years even as Portland says it’s aggressively increasing the canopy to cool the hottest parts of town.
Talk with people familiar with the workings of Urban Forestry, and a picture emerges of a program that, if you’ll pardon the expression, can’t see the forest for the trees. Critics say Cairo’s passion for trees has over the past decade often come at the expense of people living in their shade.
“Her resistance to do what’s best for the Portland taxpayer at the expense of a single tree,” says Matt Glazewski, a former top policy adviser at the city, “is not good public policy.”
Cairo says in an interview with WW that she understands “how concerning and painful those experiences can be,” adding that her goal is “literally to just get the tree corrections and outcomes.”
And now Cairo is being handed $152 million in taxpayer funds to expand and protect the city’s tree canopy, raising questions how she’ll approach an even greater responsibility.
Jenn Cairo, 54, grew up in the Shawangunk Mountains, the easternmost stretch of the Appalachians in New York state. After earning a master’s in public administration from Syracuse University and a master’s in forestry from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, she worked as a manager for the New York City Watershed, became New York State Parks’ first climbing ranger, then moved to Oregon and snagged a job overseeing a third of the Oregon Parks & Recreation Department’s lands and operations.
In 2012, while on administrative leave from the state parks department, Cairo was hired as the city of Portland’s forester, overseeing what was then a humble division of Portland Parks & Recreation with a $3.7 million annual budget and 23 employees.
Over the next 12 years, Cairo would grow Urban Forestry both in terms of resources and staff—it now has 114 employees and a budget of $26.2 million.
People who know her say her care for trees is genuine. “Jenn probably fights like hell every day for the forest,” says Dr. Vivek Shandas, a climate researcher at Portland State University’s Geography Department.
But people who have questioned her learned that was a mistake.
Laura Sloan worked at the Bureau of Environmental Services for 13 years before taking a job at Urban Forestry. Then she went out for happy hour with former colleagues from BES.
“They went off for a full hour with their horror stories of Jenn,” Sloan says. “I was hoping the stories were exaggerated.”
Sloan was fired in May of 2024 and escorted off of Urban Forestry’s campus near Delta Park. Sloan believes she was fired because she asked too many questions. (Official reason, per a letter: “argumentative behavior.”)
Last year, the city Ombudsman’s Office received three complaints alleging toxic culture at Urban Forestry. Case notes about one of the complainants read: “Doesn’t question authority or his employment will end. Keep head down and make sure no one notices him.” One longtime employee years ago asked for, and was granted, an informal agreement by which he is never alone in a room with Cairo, people familiar with the matter say.
The city, however, says it can find no record of human resources complaints against Cairo.
Meanwhile, the city forester has taken a firm grip of the Urban Forestry Commission, an 11-member advisory body that makes recommendations to her program, and the City Council, about the city’s tree canopy.
Shandas and Mark Bello, two former chairs of the commission, say it was an extension of Cairo.
Cairo says she filed a complaint against Bello after “repeated aggressive and berating behavior toward me.” Bello says he lost his chairmanship when Cairo took umbrage that he had rallied the five-member Urban Forestry Appeals Board to vote for removal of a tree that had caused one Northeast family over $10,000 in pavement damage. Bello says he was pushed out at the request of Cairo, and he stepped down willingly.
“She used her power and resources to rap us over the knuckles when the committee went against what she had to say,” Bello says. “Is there a nice word for manipulative? Here: She’s very detail-oriented.”
Cairo insists she treats people well. “I’ve been bullied many times professionally, personally, and I find it reprehensible,” she tells WW. “I think in our culture, it’s easier sometimes to complain and find fault.”
The Portland City Council approved the Tree Code in 2011 but, due to budget constraints, delayed implementing it until 2015. By that time, Cairo was the city’s head forester. That meant she was given direct control of Portland’s 4.2 million trees.
Championed by then-City Commissioners Nick Fish and Amanda Fritz, the Tree Code, or Title 11, requires homeowners to obtain the city’s permission to prune, treat or remove a tree in the planting strip across the sidewalk from their home. The Tree Code also requires city permission to remove a tree on private property that’s over 12 inches in diameter—and, in some cases, permission even to prune those private trees.
The Tree Code depends on complainers. If your neighbor thinks you overtrimmed the Douglas fir in front of your house without first obtaining a permit, they can tip off Urban Forestry. One of 27 inspectors will then arrive at your door to investigate the allegation. Urban Forestry receives about 766 complaints annually, and about 60% result in a violation.
If a violation is alleged to have occurred on private property, the city per Tree Code “will have recourse to any remedy provided by law to obtain entry, including obtaining an administrative search warrant.” (One property owner received a “final notice” from the city Jan. 9 to remove a dying Japanese lilac or else the city would seek a search warrant allowing a contractor on the property to chop the tree down.)
If Urban Forestry deems a violation occurred, it mails notice of the violation to the homeowner or tapes it to the front door. Each violation (a single tree can be the subject of multiple violations) may result in a fee of up to $1,000 per day that the violation isn’t remedied. Urban Forestry says it tries to avoid fees when possible, and instead offers homeowners ways to “remedy” the violation, including planting a new city-approved tree. To appeal costs $200.
Portland Parks & Recreation says Urban Forestry collects an average of $107,000 a year in tree permit and violation fees.
Three former Urban Forestry inspectors who spoke with WW say they were expected to uphold the Tree Code to the letter.
“As a tree inspector, I was enforcing something that I didn’t necessarily always believe in,” says Kelly Koetsier, a former UF employee. “There was never any give on Tree Code.”
Portland has one of the stricter tree codes among major cities across the country. For starters, many major cities maintain their own street trees. Others, like Denver and Seattle, do require homeowners to maintain street trees. Denver, though, doesn’t police what homeowners do with their private trees, and no permit is needed to prune a street tree—homeowners are trusted to hire licensed arborists. Seattle has a code similarly rigorous to Portland’s, though Seattle tree advocate Sandy Shettler says Portland’s Tree Code is held in “really high regard.”
Over 10 years, the Tree Code has fostered hard feelings among Portland property owners who feel it puts an unfair burden on them to take care of—and be liable for—trees that aren’t their own.
The Ombudsman’s Office received 26 complaints in 2024 about Urban Forestry and the Tree Code. Among them: $10,000 in costs associated with sidewalk damage caused by a street tree, and an affordable housing project that’s stalled due to a “hold” placed by Urban Forestry. (Tree Code also contains rules for developers.)
To be sure, many of the cases Urban Forestry examines end in ways that aren’t so unpleasant. Since June 2021, spokesman Tim Collier says, Urban Forestry’s financial hardship fee waiver program has waived $239,000 in fines. And in 2023, of the 3,000 nondevelopment removal permits requested, only 168 were denied.
City Commissioner Nick Fish died of cancer in 2020. An effort to scale back the Tree Code died along with him (see “Fallen Leaves,” here). Commissioner Amanda Fritz, who championed creation of the Tree Code, now has regrets.
“Tree Code had unintended consequences we didn’t want,” Fritz tells WW. “There was no flexibility. It was very clear very quickly that things we thought were reasonable were not in fact reasonable in the real world.”
Examples abound.
A 62-year-old hair salon owner in the Rose City Park neighborhood of Northeast Portland, records show, was dinged by Urban Forestry in late 2022 for overtrimming three trees outside her salon. The city ordered her to remove them and plant new ones. She requested a Vietnamese translator because she had a hard time understanding the notices she was receiving.
One of her longtime clients, Jean Eames, says the woman bursts into tears every time she talks about the stack of monthly bills.
“She was so happy here in America,” Eames says. “Everything was going well until she started getting these letters.”
She currently owes the city $5,524.
“I cry all the time,” the salon owner, who asked to remain anonymous, said on a recent visit. “These letters are so scary.”
The Marshall family had two firs in their Southwest Portland backyard. After the January 2024 winter storm sent similar trees crashing into homes, the Marshalls asked for a removal permit, documents from a public records request show. They were denied Feb. 7, even after four privately contracted arborists recommended removal.
Urban Forestry offered the family one option: appeal the decision for a $200 fee.
On Feb. 20, 2024, the Marshalls wrote in a letter to city commissioners that they’d “reached our breaking point with this city.” They added: “Rigid policies, like this urban tree code, put the lives of its citizens at risk. That is inexcusable for us and it is why we can no longer stay here. Responses & policies, like the below, show how little we believe this city cares about us.”
But no event captured the public’s growing antipathy for Urban Forestry like the winter storm of 2024, when ice and wind turned branches into projectiles. Among the horror stories was that of the Bond family, who had been denied a removal permit in 2022 for a tree that would later crash into their home during the winter storm (“Schrödinger’s Cat,” WW, Jan. 24, 2024).
Records obtained by WW show that the hard feelings also extended within City Hall, where officials felt Cairo hamstrung their response to the crisis.
“Urban Forestry’s services and expertise were required across the City to keep people safe. They failed us,” wrote Skyler Brocker-Knapp, a top staffer to Mayor Ted Wheeler, in a Jan. 23 email to Commissioner Dan Ryan’s chief of staff (Ryan oversaw the parks bureau at the time). “I am horrified by Urban Forestry’s dereliction of duty during an emergency.”
Brocker-Knapp wrote that Urban Forestry had “fought the very premise of incident command authority under an active emergency” and called this “unacceptable behavior.” (Portland Parks & Recreation director Adena Long wrote to Brocker-Knapp that she had inaccurate information.)
Mayor Wheeler’s chief of staff, Bobby Lee, reprimanded Cairo and Long at a meeting Jan. 29, according to two people who attended. “Bobby was pissed,” one attendee recalls. “They said the response to the storm was unacceptable.”
City sources say Long is a staunch defender of Cairo, a fellow New Yorker.
“Adena fiercely defended Jenn and their approach to the permits,” recalls a high-level policy staffer. “Meanwhile, we were hearing that people who experienced trees falling on their house were receiving pushback when they tried to request permits online.”
Ryan took action. On Jan. 30, he announced that he’d directed Urban Forestry to waive all retroactive tree removal permits affected by the storm.
The winter storm wasn’t the only source of friction with Urban Forestry. Cairo regularly had clashes with the city’s Water, Transportation and Environmental Services bureaus, eight sources tell WW.
“There wasn’t much of an effort or encouragement for UF to build constructive relationships with anybody,” says a current Urban Forestry employee. One result: The relationship between Urban Forestry and Bureau of Environmental Services eroded, with negative consequences for tree planting in East Portland (see “Old Friends, New Buds,” here).
Records and interviews with staffers also show Urban Forestry resisted the effort to consolidate the city’s permitting functions into one office. That matters because permitting slows the construction of badly needed housing.
“I am told all other bureaus came to the table with the staff requested of them for this project—except the parks bureau,” Ryan wrote to Long in a Feb. 9, 2024, email. “We will not be a weak link in this process—and I will not accept defiance or status quo as an offering.”
To onlookers at City Hall, the Jan. 16 meeting of the Portland City Council represented something they’d never seen before: an elected city official standing up to Cairo in public.
Councilor Steve Novick asked the city forester if she was aware of instances during the 2024 storm in which a tree had fallen on a family’s home after they had asked for permission to remove it.
Cairo said she “was not aware” of any such cases and noted that only 0.002% of the city’s trees were affected by the storm. (Novick told WW: “It kind of sounded like, ‘There’s lots of trees and only a few of them fall on people’s houses.’”)
Cairo and Urban Forestry quickly issued an apology for her comments. Several managers at BES tell WW it was the first time they’d ever seen an elected official challenge Cairo publicly.
Novick now says he can’t believe Cairo never apologized to the Bonds directly: “I can’t imagine not doing that if I were in Jenn’s position.”
Despite her gaffe, Cairo was recently handed the keys to $152 million in Portland Clean Energy Fund money over the next five years to plant between 15,000 and 25,000 additional trees and begin to shift much of the financial burden of caring for street trees from property owners back to the city.
Some onlookers are tentatively hopeful that the PCEF funding will mend the hard feelings. Others are less optimistic.
“Can we trust her to do what’s in the best interest of Portlanders? I don’t think so. She’s not demonstrated anything outside of her own narrow vision,” says Glazewski, the former city staffer. “Trees at all costs. Everything else is secondary.”
As for the Burtons, they no longer have elm leaf beetles. Heritage Tree 26 was chopped down, with the city’s blessing—and no thanks to Cairo.
In spring 2023, the Urban Forestry Commission reversed itself despite Cairo’s findings and recommended delisting Heritage Tree 26, and the City Council voted unanimously to approve the recommendation. Mayor Wheeler apologized to Victoria Burton for the “long-standing drama you and your family have been subjected to.”
Two years later, Victoria Burton retains a purple binder filled with hundreds of laminated pages of documents from that time. By most measures a tough cookie, Burton still gets emotional when talking about what she feels Urban Forestry put her through. All for a tree.
“To this day,” she says, “I could get up and run down the street screaming.”
Correction: A previous version of this story stated that Dr. Vivek Shandas is a professor at PSU’s Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning. He’s now with PSU’s Geography Department.