He Speaks for the Trees: Arborist Andy Gordon Joins City Staff

Andy Gordon has played in trees for as long as he can remember. He has now turned that love of trees into a career. 

Gordon was hired as the natural resource technician, a new position, for the city of East Lansing in November 2023.

“The main roles that I have within the job are the forestry program, which is just overseeing everything involved with it – tree trimming, removals, plantings – and then also the city’s soil erosion programs,” Gordon said. “That’s when we have construction sites, new development within the city, I’m responsible for monitoring the site, making sure there’s no sediment, essentially washing away soil and getting into the storm drains.”

Gordon is also the city’s first on-staff certified arborist. 

“Arboriculture is the care of trees, so that can come in a lot of different ways and can look like a lot of different job functions,” Gordon said. “Essentially, it comes down to the care of trees.”

What differentiates arboriculture from forestry is that arboriculture focuses on each tree individually, whereas forestry focuses on the forest as a whole.

“An arborist, although I am tasked with managing the urban forest of the city, a lot of the time, the work comes down to the single tree level and sort of giving each tree a unique, I guess, treating each tree uniquely and giving it the care it needs,” Gordon said. 

From being a kid to playing outside to graduating from Michigan State University (MSU) with a degree in forestry to now serving as a natural resource technician, Gordon always knew he didn’t want a “typical office job.”

After graduating from MSU in 2018, he focused on arboriculture, working in the city of Denver, Colorado as a forestry inspector. Following that, he worked as an associate forester for Consumers Energy in Hastings, Michigan, and most recently as a tree trimmer in Grand Rapids.

Gordon was able to get experience on the utility side of forestry at Consumers Energy, and is thankful for that role in his career development.

“It’s one of those fields or sides of forestry that’s a huge industry,” Gordon said. “There are entire companies that are dedicated to solely doing utility tree trimming, but unless you’re really in that work or in that realm, it’s easy to kind of be on the outside of it and not know how things work. So having those couple of years working in the utility world really opened up my world and showed me how that management is done and why it’s done.” 

Butting heads is common in the forestry industry, as trimming can sometimes appear aggressive, but having this role helped Gordon understand why that maintenance is necessary.

In his role as a tree trimmer in Grand Rapids, Gordon was able to get back up into the trees. 

“I was on the more operations side of things,” Gordon said. “I was climbing trees, trimming trees, and that was an incredible experience.” 

With many different roles under his belt, Gordon comes to East Lansing with a vast knowledge of trees and all the different dimensions of forestry.

“I’ve been lucky,” Gordon said. “I’ve worn a lot of different hats in the past six or seven years out in the workforce. I’ve worked for a lot of different cities, so that’s where I found, sort of working in the municipal side, that’s where I found my calling and what I’ve found to be the most rewarding work.”

Gordon enjoys the municipal side of forestry and arboriculture because “everyday is a little different.”

“Given that I am in this role tasked with managing our entire street tree system, there’s a lot to do in a given day, it never risks being boring, and it’s a unique work environment,” Gordon said. 

While Gordon plays a variety of roles, his main focus is proactive work.

“We’re trying to focus a lot more on proactive work, but my day-to-day right now, a lot of it is still reactive,” Gordon said.

He spends his mornings looking through emails, requests and submission forms with tree-related concerns. Depending on how many requests the city receives, responding to them can take up a good chunk of Gordon’s day. But if there are few to none, he is able to get other work done.

Gordon is currently working on updating the city’s tree inventory.

“We have a lot of city trees and we have them all cataloged,” Gordon said. “But this was completed, I want to say in 2017, so it’s been a while. A lot has changed in our urban forest, so that has to be updated.”

When he’s not focusing on trees, Gordon is in charge of inspections of soil erosion on construction sites. This is typically done on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on the site and different variables. 

Social erosion can happen when construction equipment begins to kill vegetation and can potentially cause land degradation. 

“If there is any sort of sediment being tracked off site, loss of migration, then that’s a concern,” Gordon said. “They [the construction sites] have a soil erosion plan they’re supposed to follow with silt fences and that sort of thing. As long as those are being taken care of, there’s really no issues.”

In all his work, Gordon tries to keep in mind the big picture: The care of trees.

“The big thing we’ve been working on the past couple of months was our contract for street tree pruning and then our street tree plantings,” Gordon said.

City Council approved $246,547 to be spent on a new program for tree care services that Gordon’s department has been working on over the past few months.

Top Notch Tree Care will be conducting tree trimming around the city, and Gee Farms will be doing tree plantings.

Top Notch Tree Care will provide maintenance for 15% of the city’s street trees each year for a seven-year cycle. 

What this project means for the city is that “we’ll essentially have a more resilient urban forest,” Gordon said. 

“We’ve always planted,” Gordon said. “We’ve historically done tree plantings in-house with our parks crew, but they have a lot on their plates, so they don’t have a ton of time dedicated to tree planting. So now, with this outsource, we’ll still likely do supplemental planting, but that will likely free up some time for our parks staff to beautify parks elsewhere. Really, it will allow us to plant more trees than we typically do.”

Both the tree trimming and tree planting will provide a lasting environmental impact on the city.

“Just seeing more trees in the ground, that’s gonna be a big change that folks will see,” Gordon said. “As far as the tree trimming, really the purpose of that is to manage trees and making sure we’re doing that structural pruning to protect the trees.” 

Gordon looks forward to seeing this project be carried out and is excited about his new role in East Lansing. 

“I love being outside, I love trees, I love looking at trees, and I love the community,” Gordon said. “I like engaging with residents and I’m lucky to work here because, for the most part, residents love trees…When updating our inventory, a lot of folks have seen me out in the field, they come up and talk to me, and everybody’s really excited about it. I think people are seeing that we’re kind of on the up and up for urban forestry, and a lot of folks are excited to see that.”