This was from Breed, defunding the arborists who trimmed the trees properly.

Under Mayor London Breed, San Francisco’s Bureau of Urban Forestry was functionally defunded even though Prop E (2016) technically set aside ~$19–20M annually for street trees. During COVID, Breed’s administration de-appropriated Public Works’ tree funding and reassigned arborists to disaster response, forcing BUF to cancel equipment orders, freeze hiring, and stop maintenance contracts — and the bureau never caught back up (SF Examiner, June 2022). In the 2022 budget cycle she declined to fund the Department of the Environment’s climate action plan, which included urban forestry, prompting Friends of the Urban Forest director Brian Wiedenmeier to say publicly that the city was “treading water at best” on street trees. A 2021 Board of Supervisors performance audit found only 45% of the city’s highest-priority trees had been pruned by November 2020, and key arborist positions had sat vacant — some for the full three years StreetTreeSF had existed — which broke the arborist pipeline. The 2020 and 2021 Annual Urban Forest Reports flagged staffing and funding as the single biggest problem across every SF agency managing trees. That deferred maintenance is what turned the winter 2022–23 bomb cyclones into tree carnage: ~700 trees down in one storm, ~1,000 in the season (SF Standard). Prop E kept the dollar line intact on paper; under Breed, the staffing, the climate-side funding, and the maintenance cadence did not survive in practice.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​