Madeline Ryder recalls seeing dozens of pink, yellow, blue, purple and red wildflowers last spring, swaying in front of a Tucson City Council office, set against the backdrop of Grant Road traffic.
“Bees ambled into (a) little leaf cordia’s white, papery flowers, their butts and hind legs dangling outside the petals. Milkweed vines and trailing dalea provided shaded ground cover for caterpillars, lizards, and beetles to roam,” Ryder said. “It was the most beautiful landscape I had seen in Tucson and not a single drop of municipal water was spent to make it happen.”
Now, all that remains of the plants are her memories. The plants that had been irrigated for years with rainwater flowing at the Ward 3 Council office at 1511 E. Grant Road were cleared recently by a city Parks and Recreation Department maintenance crew.
This was the second time in a little over a year that city maintenance workers removed or chopped vegetation at council ward offices that had thrived on harvested rainwater. The first clearing occurred at the Ward 1 office at 940 W. Alameda St.
The clearings irk water harvesting supporters because they have come at a time when the city is promoting harvesting and “green infrastructure” in general on several fronts.
Those efforts include Mayor Regina Romero’s pledge to plant a million trees by 2030 and passage of a small fee tacked onto water bills to speed the planting of trees and shrubs irrigated by rainwater.
Both City Council sites were maintained by volunteers working under the Watershed Management Group, which promotes and designs water harvesting systems. Until recently, Ryder was overseeing that effort.
“Nothing remained but upturned dirt and dry, hollow basins. The landscape that for years was lovingly cared for by scores of volunteers was reduced to a barren moonscape,” Ryder wrote to the Arizona Daily Star recently about seeing the Ward 3 site after the clearing.
Lara Hamwey, the city’s Parks and Recreation Department chief, has apologized for the latest incident and pledged it won’t happen again. Hamwey, who wasn’t director when the Ward 1 incident occurred, promises to get vegetation replanted and to carry out an overhaul of training to prevent a recurrence.
But Brian Ellis, who worked as a volunteer at the Ward 3 site, calls the barren landscape remaining an eyesore and an embarrassment.
“Please let me know how you’re going to rectify the situation and how you’re going to prevent it from happening again,” Ellis wrote in a recent email to Hamwey. “After spending the last 2+ years volunteering to care for the Ward 3 site, I’m not sure I want to waste any more of my time if this is how the city mistreats and disrespects its green spaces and community members.”
At the Ward 1 site a year ago, city crews were “cutting everything to half their size, cutting shrubs into cubes, chopping the whole tops off,” Ryder said.
A foothills paloverde tree there “looked like they had taken a chainsaw to it,” Ryder said. “All the tips, all the branches were cut off.”
Hamwey declined to say why a city maintenance worker cleared the Ward 3 vegetation and declined to name the worker. She can’t speak specifically to the employee’s “mindset,” she said. “It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to do that,” said Hamwey.
But Hamwey said the city already is seeking a quote on a price for the restoration work from Watershed Management Group, a nonprofit group that has overseen maintenance of harvested water-fed landscapes at three council ward offices for a decade.
“We have been in touch with the Watershed Group, the City’s new Urban Forester and Green Stormwater Infrastructure coordinator to address not just our immediate response but long term planning to avoid a repeat of this occurring,” Hamwey wrote to Ellis last week.
“Part of my objective is to help facilitate a culture change and training for staffing to allow us to ensure we are in step with changes citywide from climate action planning, Million Trees, conservation, embracing native, etc.,” Hamwey wrote.
Conservationists say that to turn things around, the city must overcome a history of continued damage to public, rain-nurtured landscapes. Major policy changes on this issue are needed at City Hall, they said.
Harold Thomas, Watershed Management’s associate director, Ryder and Emma Stahl-Wert, who has also maintained landscaping at council offices, said over the years, city crews often over-pruned trees and removed mulch and landscaping without consulting with Watershed Management that has contracts to maintain the sites.
The landscaping effort was begun in the middle 2000s at four ward offices, done with grant funding to the watershed group. Offices installed cisterns to catch rainwater flowing off roofs. Crews dug basins and berms to route stormwater where it could be most effectively captured.
They were maintained by volunteers known as the Monsoon Squad, supervised by Watershed Management staffers including Stahl-Wert and Ryder at various times.
Thomas said he hopes the latest incidents will be catalysts for the city to improve traditional landscaping methods.
“Traditional landscapers view these spaces as a kitchen or living room. They think it needs to be a sterile site where they blow everything out,” Thomas said. “They want a gravel, easy to clean space that you can eat your breakfast off of. That’s not how nature works.”
His group wants certified arborists to take care of the city’s investments in trees, to avoid overpruning, he said.
He hopes replanting at the Ward 3 office can start by April, but he is uncertain about Ward 1. Replanting there has been pushed back a couple of times, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and because its council member, Lane Santa Cruz, wants it to be a community-wide effort, he said.
“She’s committed to it, her staff is committed to it, the neighborhood is committed to it,” Thomas said.
Santa Cruz didn’t respond to a request from the Star for comment on restoration plans. Via a text message sent by Stahl-Wert, Santa Cruz said she wants to see Tucson’s public landscapes better managed and was upset by the Ward 1 plant-clearing.
