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2002 — the present
The smaller designations: Two lesser institutional honors complete the city's own page, printed at the small size they honestly carry. The National League of Cities gave South Bend its Gold Award for Municipal Excellence in 2002 and again in 2010, both in Mayor Luecke's tenure, as the city's record carries them. And the Arbor Day Foundation's Tree City USA designation — the national program, run with the U.S. Forest Service and the state foresters, that asks a city for a tree board, a tree-care ordinance, a per-capita forestry budget, and an Arbor Day observance — is a standing South Bend designation counted by the city in years: the Parks and Recreation Department's 2015 annual report counts seventeen straight years of it, and the Venues Parks & Arts forestry division's current Arbor Day listing counts twenty-nine. The two counts together place the first designation in the late 1990s; neither the city's reports nor the Foundation's published record reached states the first year outright, and the ledger prints the counts rather than an invented start date.
Sources:
- City of South Bend record of the Luecke administration — the National League of Cities Gold Award for Municipal Excellence, 2002 and 2010.
- City of South Bend, Parks & Recreation Annual Report 2015 — the Forestry Division and "17 straight years" of the city's arbor designation; City of South Bend, Venues Parks & Arts Arbor Day listing — "29 years as a Tree City."
- Arbor Day Foundation, Tree City USA program standards, as summarized in the Congressional Research Service's Arbor Day fact sheet — the four requirements.