At night, what sounds like the leaves of Springfield’s street trees rustled by the breeze is really those trees whispering to each other. And the word they say most often is “Langfelder.”
When Jim Langfelder became Springfield mayor in 2015, one of his first hires was a city arborist. In 2019 he reinvigorated the city’s volunteer Urban Forestry Commission (UFC), which had lain dormant for nearly 10 years, by appointing people who not only cared about trees but knew about trees. The Arbor Day Foundation in 2020 gave Springfield a Growth Award for the community’s renewed commitment to urban forest management.
Out on the streets, vigorous tree planting meant the city was gaining as many trees as it was losing to disease and age and storms, the city undertook to get young people interested in the capital city’s urban forest that they will inherit and Morton Arboretum gave Springfield money to inventory the street trees in the northeast quadrant of the city. (You laugh? The city knows how many miles of sidewalk it needs to maintain.)
Usually tree program grants are measured in tens of thousands; in 2023 the UFC landed a federal tree grant worth $899,000 from the Biden administration (since rescinded by Trump for being too green and too Black) for tree-planting in the poor parts of town. All this led the state’s official urban forester to describe Springfield as a leading community in the field; this was like hearing Springfield praised for the sophistication of its cuisine.
These days there is a mournful note in the whispers of our trees. As was reported in these pages in February 2025, all of the appointed members of the Urban Forest Commission resigned, saying that they could not work with the administration of new Mayor Misty Buscher because new Mayor Misty Buscher would not work with (indeed would not even talk with) the commission. (See “Springfield Urban Forestry Commission members resign,” Feb. 27, 2025).
Usually all that most mayors ask of citizen advisory commissions is that they not embarrass the mayors. However, Langfelder’s UFC members included not just tree-huggers but grant writers and organizers who went outside Springfield for advice and political support. In short, they did what the city ought to have been doing and did it well. Maybe the UFC was seen as uppity; you ask people to take care of the city’s trees and things are going to get a little proprietary. Maybe the problem is just that they were Langfelder’s guys and not Buscher’s guys; politicians get proprietary, too.
What interested me about all this is how the issue that affected the management of the city’s trees programs – namely, the appropriate role of private actors in public tree programs – affects the management of actual public trees out on the streets of the city. Street trees have always been seen as a public resource but the responsibility for their maintenance falls substantially on private citizens. Yes, residents adjacent to public trees get shade and enhanced property value, but whether that’s a bargain is a little murky. The city does the planting, the citizen does most of everything else. The tree itself complicates lawn care, neighborliness is often strained if unraked leaves get blown next door, leaves and branches must be kept off of sidewalks and out of gutters. And when a city tree’s roots clog a private sewer pipe it’s the pipe owner who must pay to unclog it.
These costs – in effort and time as well as money – are an unofficial tax on individual homeowners. It is a famous example of what economists call a public goods problem in which the benefits of a resource held in common – in this case cooler air, beauty, bird song – are enjoyed for free by everyone while the cost is borne by a few.
Whoever is advising the mayor about the scope of her tree program might suggest that more attention be paid to the problem of equity – not which neighborhoods get trees (one of the objectives of the Biden tree grant) but how trees in every neighborhood are paid for. Advanced metropolises around the country, including several in Illinois, are trying or at least talking about new ways to make life easier for tree-adjacent property owners. Autonomous robotic leaf sweepers and vacuum equipment. Tree varieties that have smaller leaves or that hold leaves longer. Revised subdivision regs that replace parkways with forested medians. Insurance funds to help repair clogged sewer laterals. Special purpose urban forestry districts supported by tree levies.
That will require committed, sustained, informed, coordinated efforts over decades to plant the right kinds of trees and invest in the right kinds of equipment and dare to ask for higher taxes to pay for it. Finding ways to work with committed citizens would seem to be the easy part.
This article appears in June 11-17, 2026.
I involuntarily inherited ash trees in my front yard city right of way when I purchased my home. They died, and the city cut them down two years later but left it to me to remove the unsightly stumps and backfill the resulting hole.