Vote | Protect Newton Trees

Election 2025: Where do Newton Candidates stand?

Protect Newton Trees advocates for strong protections for Newton’s mature trees. In 2023, more than 450 residents joined us in signing a petition calling for City policies to better protect and expand our tree canopy. The basis of the updated Newton Tree Preservation Ordinance, which went into effect March 2024, is that our tree canopy is a valuable resource for the wellbeing of City residents, visitors, and businesses. Trees reduce heat and flooding, improve air quality, provide habitat for wildlife, improve physical and mental health, and more. For more information, please see our information pages.

We asked all the Mayoral and City Council Candidates ten questions about tree preservation and the 2024 ordinance. Click on a Candidate's name to see their response to all the questions. (If not clickable, they provided no response.) Click on a question to see responses from all the Candidates.

Questions Asked

Questions 1–8 asked Candidates to rate their responses to the statement using the following scale:

Disagree 1 2 3 4 5 Agree

Q1: It is important to support the Newton Tree Preservation Ordinance because it preserves and protects existing trees and provides for planting replacement trees.

Q2: Newton needs both housing and trees. It is important to develop policies that promote low-impact development to protect our shared green infrastructure (trees, waterways, and wetlands).

Q3: Properly sited trees block winter winds and provide shade from summer sun, reducing energy use for heating and cooling, thus saving families money and reducing carbon emissions. (For example, when the City of Worcester cut down about 30,000 trees because of the Asian Longhorned Beetle, temperatures on tree-bare streets increased nearly 10 degrees F and increased the average family's cooling costs.) Newton needs a strong ordinance to preserve trees, especially in our environmental justice neighborhoods and wherever there are heat islands from lack of trees.

Q4: Newton needs to maintain the Ordinance’s existing protections for trees on an entire property and resist efforts to limit tree protections to setback areas (the strips around the border of a property).

Q5: Newton needs to apply the Ordinance’s tree protection requirements in the same way to all properties, including 1- and 2-family residences, which are 80% of Newton’s residential property and 53% of all City land.

Q6: The Tree Warden has reported that the number #1 complaint to the City’s Urban Forestry Department for the past 20 years is when work on one lot causes damage to trees on neighboring lots. Newton residents have also reported that knowing in advance about a plan to cut trees on a neighboring property has allowed friendly conversations about preservation of trees. Therefore the requirement to notify neighbors of an application to cut trees should be extended to include all permits on all properties.

Q7: The tree canopy and biodiversity are both important. All mature trees provide significant climate benefits, so the Newton Tree Preservation Ordinance should continue to avoid any blanket exemption for invasive species, but allow for weighing the harm versus benefit of removing non-native trees.

Q8: The City needs to evaluate our progress on preserving and expanding Newton’s tree canopy. We need better data collection about trees preserved and cut down.

Questions 9–10 were open-ended: