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City Ponders Hows, Whys of Saving Trees

January 25, 2007

By LOYD BRUMFIELD / Today Newspapers

It sounds easy on paper, crafting a tree ordinance. But as the city of Cedar Hill is finding out, ironing out the details and putting it into practice will be a long, time-consuming chore.

The city council and other members of the city’s staff held a workshop Jan. 18 at the Cedar Hill Recreation Center in an effort to get educated on the hows, whys and do’s and don’ts of a protective tree ordinance - something that many residents have long called for.

“I’ve talked to a lot of people in other cities, and each one tells me, ‘If you’re going to do this, you’re going to need a full-time person to monitor it,’” Planning Director Rod Tyler told the council.

Council member Wade Emmert asked him if he was going to include that suggestion in his next budget request, and Tyler said he was hoping the Parks and Recreation Department would hire an arborist.

The Jan. 18 meeting was held basically to get council members familiar with the language involved, the purpose of the ordinance and the path to get it approved.

Tyler and his staff constructed a purpose statement for the ordinance that calls for protecting a “diminishing natural resource (native and adapted trees), to balance the needs of land development with the goals of preserving mature trees, encourage the planting of trees to replace those lost due to land development and provide a means to ‘mitigate’ the loss of Protected Trees due to land development.”

Council members and Mayor Rob Franke were receptive to the creation of an ordinance, but many worried about the longterm costs.

“What I’ve seen so far seems too restrictive,” Council member Greg Patton said. “Overall I like it, but I’m concerned about the cost, because that’s going to be passed on to buyers.”

Tyler did not try to sugarcoat things.

“We’re talking tens of thousands of dollars (for developers),” he said. “And if your lot is particularly big, it could get into the hundreds of thousands.”

Protected trees are defined as any species of tree that is 8 inches or more in diameter, measured 4 feet above the ground and don’t belong to a few species of trees that have undesirable characteristics such as weak wood, are generally short-lived or have destructive habits, such as wild-growing, invasive roots systems.

The 8-inch number is just a rough figure and the city can change it to whatever it wants, Tyler said.

“How about 30 inches?” Patton said, drawing laughs.

Trees that branch out immediately from the ground, rather than sprouting a trunk and branches, would generally not be protected, Tyler said.

“Then the question is, is it a tree or a bush?” he said.

Developers would have several mitigation options in order to protect trees, Tyler said, including transplanting protected trees, planting smaller trees, preserving groves of smaller trees and cash payments to a reforestation fund for the city to use to replant trees.

“What if the transplanted tree dies?” Public Information Officer Corky Brown asked.

Tyler said it was doubtful very many developers would choose to transplant existing trees.

“Transplanted trees need a lot of heavy equipment and a lot of people to move it,” Tyler said. “The older the tree, the bigger its root zone, so I don’t think you’ll see this option a lot because it will be expensive.”

But if developers opt for replacing bigger trees with smaller ones, they’d have to do it “at a rate that is twice the total caliper inches of Protected Trees to be removed.”

If developers replace bigger trees with so many smaller ones that a congestive situation is created, some of those trees can be given to the city for planting on other lots, Tyler said in reply to a question raised by Council member Makia Epie.

Smaller trees to replace bigger ones must be described as a “large canopy” tree as listed in the city’s landscape ordinance and must be a minimum of 3 caliper inches, although the city can adjust those numbers when it sits down to craft the ordinance, Tyler said.

If the developer chooses to pay cash to the city’s reforestation fund, the city must come up with an appropriate fee, Tyler said, saying that his figure of $150 per caliper inch of protected trees removed was something he “picked out of the air.”

Developers would be asked to submit a tree protection plan when they platted their land, and it would have to be approved before any work or land clearing could start.

In order to ease costs for developers, no tree survey would be required, Tyler suggested, because it would save them from having to hire engineers and surveyors.

“I can tell you that it does get expensive,” said Franke, an engineer.

Instead of a tree survey, developers would simply have to list the trees on their property and say which ones would be protected, which ones wouldn’t and how they plan to mitigate any destruction of protected trees.

“I have competing opinions,” Council member Wade Emmert said. “On the one hand, I want to preserve our natural beauty as much as possible, but I’m also concerned about landowners’ rights. Generally speaking, everybody says they want to preserve trees until they’re the ones who have to do it.”

Emmert added that he was appreciative of the work the staff and Mayor Pro Tem Cory Spillman have done in working to construct an ordinance.

Franke supported the idea of a tree ordinance.

“It’s the right thing to do,” he said. “We don’t want the city to become, as people have called it, ‘Concrete Hill.’”

Tyler emphasized that any city ordinance would be largely aesthetic in nature rather than environmental, and Patton wondered about preserving trees that may be hundreds of years old.

“It seems like you’re not really saving Old Granddad you’re just replacing it,” he said.

Franke said any ordinance would not be geared toward stopping development.

“If Old Granddad is in the middle of where Dillard’s wants to go, then Old Granddad’s out of here,” he said.

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