Supervisors approve pilot project to fund eucalyptus tree removal in North County.

On June 4, the Monterey County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve a pilot project to help fund the removal of invasive eucalyptus trees within defensible space of structures or roads within District 2, i.e. North County.

The pilot project, intended to mitigate wildfire risk, is funded by $1 million of state funds and will last up to three years. It was spearheaded by state Sen. John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, and District 2 Supervisor Glenn Church, and will launch on a first-come, first-serve basis sometime this summer.

In a county news briefing on June 5, Church said there’s already about 75 people lined up, but that applications will have to be made to his office once the program goes live (he hopes that can happen by Aug. 1). 

The program will pay for half of an accepted applicant's costs to remove or trim eucalyptus trees on private land within 100 feet of a structure or road. Per a county report, the average cost of removing a single eucalyptus tree is about $5,000.

“I have a hunch these funds are going to go fairly fast,” Church said in the online June 5 briefing, during which he repeatedly praised Laird for securing the state funds to make it happen. “I’m really optimistic about this program and how it’s going to turn out.”

Per the project approval, none of the tree removal can infringe on Monarch butterfly, bird nesting, wetland or riparian habitats, but Church was clear that none of that would be a problem—there are plenty of eucalyptus trees in North County outside of those protected habitats. 

"It is really rather limited, but it provides a very critical and very significant step toward wildfire prevention, because it really has an opportunity to protect people’s lives, their homes, their property and everything they own," Church said.

"Eucalyptus trees are one of the most flammable trees in the world, and this is an area [where] we get a lot of offshore winds coming in, and it’s very densely populated for a rural area, plus it’s densely forested, and with a lot of the dead end roads that are around…this has a lot of features similar to what we saw in Paradise.” 

Eucalyptus trees are common in District 2—there’s a whole corridor of them along Highway 101 near the county line (which was featured in the Alfred Hitchcock classic Vertigo), and their seeds were brought from Australia to California in the 1850s to provide timber. Early American settlers in California decimated much of the native oak woodlands, in part for fuel, and eucalyptus were widely planted in their place because they grow fast, including in poor soil, and they burn. 

The pilot project the supervisors approved June 4 aims to take some of that fuel off the map.