Last month I wrote a column about the inadequacy of local tree ordinances to do what they were designed to do — save trees.
Since then, I’ve heard from readers around the metro area about their own personal tree battles and their mostly vain struggles to preserve centuries-old trees as development picks up for the first time since the beginning of the Great Recession. It turns out the fight over Atlanta’s expansive tree canopy is actually a series of skirmishes as neighborhood activists line up against developers and city planners to save trees tagged for the chainsaw.
In Tucker, neighborhood activists are working to save what’s left of a 100-foot buffer of trees between an older residential neighborhood and a new massive shopping center at LaVista Road and I-285. Resident Jane Tanner said the developers are clear cutting 40 feet of the buffer and thinning another 20 feet — effectively removing dozens of hardwood trees older than the neighborhood they abut.
Spreading out a blueprint of the development, Tanner has highlighted “border trees” — those in the 20-foot DMZ — the development plans to remove.
“This one is inside the line,” she said, jabbing a finger at crosshatch mark on the plans. “They are taking this one too.”
In Midtown, resident Laila Flores-Cervantes, who lives in a condominium near Piedmont Park, has spent the past year filing appeals with the city of Atlanta to save individual “champion” trees — the largest specimens — from developers. So far she’s gotten developers to modify their plans to replace more trees, but the neighborhood has lost a lot of the mature trees on her block.
“The moment they took out those trees that whole block became a heat island,” she said.
In Kirkwood, community activists organized to try to save a 2.5-acre wooded lot from clear cutting to make way for 11 upscale homes. The centerpiece of the effort was a 200-year-old white oak believed to the be oldest in Atlanta. The effort attracted media attention and the help of several state lawmakers, but the development — which was already approved before neighbors got organized, went ahead.
Last October, the old oak came down as the lot was cleared.
“I personally avoid that site like the plague,” said Kirkwood resident Susanne Blam, who was part of the effort. “To me, looking at it right after it happened felt raw.”
She prefers to go around the corner to another part of the development where the builder agreed to modify the site plan to preserve a 100-year-old red oak.
“The tree is standing. It can be done,” she said.
Fees aren’t all used to replace lost trees
But it shouldn’t be that hard.
“We have a lot more that we can do,” said Stephanie Stuckey Benfield, head of the City of Atlanta’s Office of Sustainability.
Benfield, a former state lawmaker and environmental lawyer, was part of the Kirkwood campaign before agreeing to come to work for the city. She recognizes that tree ordinances — Atlanta’s and others — are not as effective as they could be.
The counties and cities with tree ordinances in the metro area have similar systems that allow developers to petition to remove trees that are either in the way of new building or are deemed too much of a hazard to keep. In exchange for removing the trees, developers pay a penalty — called “recompense” — that, in theory, is used to replace the lost trees.
By and large, that’s not happening. Metro area governments are not using the all tree money from developers to replace lost trees. Instead, some of that money goes into staff costs, education programs and to plug other budgetary holes.
Atlanta City Councilman Howard Shook said how the city uses recompense money is “a scandal.”
“I think it’s a shame that Atlanta doesn’t nearly pay enough attention to replanting trees as it should,” he said.
‘A battle over each … tree’
Benfield said there are a lot of problems with replanting, starting with the idea that mature trees can be replaced with saplings.
“Replanting is not ‘no net loss,’” she said. “It’s making up for net loss.”
Eventually.
For those unfamiliar with how this works, trees grow slow. It takes decades for young trees to replace mature trees that cleaned the city’s troubled air and water and shaded the city’s desirable in-town neighborhoods.
Benfield said she is preparing a change to the city’s tree ordinance that would allow her to use penalties assessed against developers to buy existing trees, effectively preserving them from future development.
It may be a tough sell. Shook, who co-sponsored the city’s original tree ordinance, said it isn’t working for tree activists or developers, in part because the arbitrary way it is enforced.
“I think the people who administer and enforce the tree ordinance pay more attention to any given individual tree than they do to the overall tree canopy,” he said. “I would say we have reached an ironical outcome where the tree canopy is not what is discussed. It’s a battle over each and every individual tree.”
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