"In sum, the report says, for every dollar invested in Portland's public trees, those trees return $3.80 in benefits."

Well heack if that's true they should double the investment and give everyone raises.

I'm going to try and do the math on this one just for fun. The public trees provide "some $27 million of aesthetic and environmental benefits" while costing "about $6.6 million" to manage. That would be a net "aesthetic and environmental" benefit of $20.4 million per year. Those same trees, according to the study, have a "theoretical" value of $2.3 billion. If assets of $2.3 billion provide an estimated aesthetic and environmental flow of $20.4 per year, then their rate of return equals 0.89%. I don't think many aesthetic and environmental investors would be lining up to buy those returns at that price.

Since "aesthetic and environmental" cash flows are fairly low risk, we'll say the required return on investment is 4.27%, equal to the city's borrowing rate (minus the bond insurance). At that rate, the value of the public trees is only $477.8 million. At that lower estimate of value, instead of returning $3.80 per dollar invested, they only return $0.79. If the government is going to pay for "months of data crunching" from the City Nature Urban Forestry division for a theoretical and nonsensical report, they should at least ensure that the numbers reported could be considered plausible in some form. Don’t get me wrong, I like trees, but this report appears to be pure idiocy. Feel free to correct me if I missed something.

Great. Another nonsensical use of public $$. Did we really have people working for months on this study, at taxpayer expense?

The last sentence of the article summed it up well - "Because trees are priceless, it's sort of like asking someone to put a dollar value on a trusted friend."

Exactly. That's why you don't waste time and money trying to do so.

Here's the bigger question, in my mind. Why EXACTLY did the City want to peg a dollar value to the trees?? The possible answers worry me...

The City probably conducted the study so they could give $3.80 in tax credits to favored developers for every dollar they spend on tree planting.

The City probably conducted the study so they could give $3.80 in tax credits to favored developers for every dollar they spend on tree planting.

Don't forget the more basic goal of any thriving bureaucracy: appearing to be doing something. They've got to keep all those employees busy spending money on BS like this or someone may notice that many of them are superfluous, inefficient, wasteful, etc...

...at least they don't have to worry about anyone in the local media noticing.

I'm worried they'll try to borrow more money, using the trees as security...

When it comes to infill, the trees become worthless.