Residents throughout City Council District 14 will soon see landscape companies digging holes and planting trees in their neighborhoods, thanks to approval by the Jacksonville City Council to spend almost $800,000 to add to the beauty and walkability of the historic district.

With a grant from the U.S. Forest Service, Jacksonville has hired a Virginia-based nonprofit to study the city’s trees and how they can be better utilized to address the problems of urban stormwater runoff, among other things. The city is hosting a public meeting on Thursday, February 28, where officials will discuss the study and seek input from residents. The event is scheduled to run from 6 to 8 p.m. at San Marco Preservation Hall, 1652 Atlantic Blvd.

If you’ve always wanted or needed to plant a tree in the right-of-way in front of your property, now you can, thanks to the City of Jacksonville’s tree settlement with a variety of civic groups in July 2017. The suit filed in 2015 by the Public Trust Environmental Legal Institute of Florida challenged the city’s use of the Tree Mitigation Trust Fund established in 2000 by charter amendment. Developers pay into the fund when they cut down trees and the money is supposed to be used to mitigate the loss by paying for new trees to be planted elsewhere in Duval County.