Salt Lake City employees accidentally poisoned hundreds of trees along North Temple after spraying them with an herbicide, the Fairpark Community Council said Tuesday.
The group said over 200 trees were poisoned by the Parks Division.
The community council said the city blamed the issue on a “procedural error” by the Parks Division, which applied an herbicide on the trees by mistake.
“We will let y’all know when we know more but currently it is a sit and wait to see what and if some trees will make it,” the group wrote in a post on social media on Tuesday. “The State of Utah is involved and is currently testing the ground in hopes to plant trees in their place.”
The post included images of trees that had no leaves. Those trees were in parkstrips near sidewalks, as well as in medians closer to the Utah Transit Authority’s Trax line running along North Temple.
The mistake would be a setback for the west side community that already suffers from a lower urban canopy that is less than half of the canopy coverage of the city’s east side.
Mayor Erin Mendenhall has made it a point of her administration to try to improve the west side’s canopy since taking office in 2020.
The city didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. Mendenhall is in Paris in anticipation of the city and state officially being named host of the 2034 winter Olympics tomorrow morning.
Councilman Ale Puy, whose district includes a portion of the North Temple corridor, confirmed the accident happened at least two months ago.
“I’ve been asking since day one to our city administration what are doing not only to make sure this doesn’t ever happen again, but what is the city going to do to make up for it,” Puy said. “I am still waiting for that.”
Puy said the city was overwatering the trees in an attempt to flush out the chemicals that shocked them.
“This community deserves we make up for this horrible mistake. We need to show my community we care about rebuilding trust and we are willing to show it,” he said. “I can’t personally look my neighbors in eye and tell them to trust their city when expanding open space, or opening a new park, or enhancing existing ones when we drop the ball this low.”
The North Temple corridor is seeing an influx of high-density and low-income housing along the corridor, with thousands of new units at some stage of the development pipeline. The accidental poisoning would be a significant setback for those new and existing residents.
The Fairpark Community Council said it would ask the city to plant more trees to make up for the accident.
“We are asking for two planted trees for every one killed, water and extra support to replace the decade old trees [our] community has lost,” the group wrote. “It is a sad tree summer on” North Temple.
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