City Council passed a (non-binding) resolution on April 17, 2023 to establish a goal of achieving and maintaining 50% tree canopy cover and to request a study every five years to evaluate the effectiveness of the Tree Protection Ordinance in meeting that goal. The 50% goal should help guide the development of tree-related initiatives and to monitor the success of those policies and programs.

For this resolution to serve any real purpose, City Council must now commit to the changes needed not only to the Tree Ordinance, but to the changes being presently discussed in our Zoning Ordinances, to facilitate greater tree preservation as well as the replanting of trees that are removed. Those changes include setting better standards for tree preservation, limiting the amount of land that can be disturbed in site development, and raising recompense fees to the current rate it costs to replace removed trees inch-for-inch.

Presently, the mandated recompense fees do not begin to cover the actual costs of tree replanting nor are most of the recompense fees collected being spent on tree replanting. Only a quarter of the total recompense collected each year is spent on tree replanting; the remainder is spent on salaries, administrative costs, forested land purchases, and tree maintenance. That’s got to stop. We need to start collecting the money required to replant the trees that are removed and use that money to replant trees; otherwise, we are only ensuring a gradual erosion of our tree canopy.

In 2022 City Planning invited a group Tree Ordinance "stakeholders"  -- consisting of people from the development community, tree advocates, city employees, and City Council members  -- to draft some changes to the tree ordinance that everyone mostly agreed upon. Because the main objective of this "Phase 1" of the Tree Ordinance revisions, implemented on April 14, 2023, was to seek consensus as opposed to preserving the tree canopy, the changes implemented are too modest to make much difference in the rate we are losing our tree canopy. However, the changes do provide the City Arborist with more tools to help builders minimize destruction of tree roots. They also provide better tree planting specifications in terms of tree species diversity, spacing, and soil volume.

One change that the tree community welcomes is the extension of the timeframe to appeal approved tree removals on private property from 5 to 7 days, although we shouldn’t forget that prior to 2008, the public had 15 calendar days to appeal private property tree removals.

Click here to see the updated Tree Ordinance. The actual changes made to the ordinance are reflected in this document.

Phase 2 of the Tree Ordinance revisions has yet to be scheduled.