Today, Oct. 3, is City of Forest Day, celebrating New York’s urban forest and the people working to expand and care for it.

Constituents regularly call our office asking how they can get a tree planted in an empty tree pit or replace one that has died. Until recently, we could tell them to request a new street tree through 311. The Parks Department has stopped accepting individual requests as it shifts to its Neighborhood Tree Planting Program.

Council members also had the option of allocating capital funding for additional tree planting in their districts, supplementing Parks’ planting budget. Parks is no longer accepting those allocations for new street trees either.

We all have the same goal: getting more trees in the ground. On Sept. 22, the administration announced that the city planted 18,261 trees in Fiscal Year 2026, the most in a single fiscal year in a decade. We........

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