I’m so tired. Tired of waiting on Atlanta to protect its trees.
For nearly a dozen years, there’s been aborted effort after aborted effort to strengthen Atlanta’s tree ordinance and expand the city’s tree canopy.
Fortunately, after months — even years — of little to no progress, there’s now movement.
A new effort led by mediator Michael Elliott is seeking to find consensus among the various stakeholders. Elliott is a Georgia Tech professor who has been mediating complex disputes in Atlanta since the mid-1980s.
“My hope is we would get a tree ordinance and policy changes that would protect trees effectively while still enabling urban development to occur,” Elliott said in an interview. “The ultimate success would mean the city could meet its goal for 50 percent tree canopy.”
In April, the Atlanta City Council passed a resolution calling for the city to have a tree canopy of 50 percent. The problem? We are moving in the wrong direction.
Elliott said it is estimated Atlanta’s current tree canopy is 46.1 percent — far higher than other major U.S. cities, which have an average 34 percent tree canopy.
But trees are Atlanta’s trademark.
“I’m an Atlanta native so I love, love, love our trees and our tree canopy,” said Atlanta City Councilman Michael Julian Bond. “Trees are a way we preserve our identity as a city.”
Bond expressed concern about how long it has taken the city to get serious about protecting its trees and expanding its tree canopy.
“The process has ground to a halt,” said Bond, who added that a change in administration hindered the most recent efforts. “There’s been a huge delay. How many trees have we lost while we have been trying to find a mediator? Now is the time to get going.”
As Bond sees it, right now the tree ordinance is “lopsided” in favor of developers. Whenever changes are suggested to amend and strengthen the tree ordinance, they get bogged down with developers arguing against regulations that could limit their ability to develop land and make money.
“With all the development, I see a real need — more than at any other time in our history — for our trees to be protected,” Bond said. “I don’t see the need for people to cut trees in order to make money. We want the building code and the tree ordinance to be flexible enough to be reasonable.”
Elliott can sympathize with those who are frustrated by the lack of movement, and he is hoping to help break the impasse.
“The people who know best how to design an ordinance are those who have to live with it,” Elliott said. “It’s always about whether they have enough incentives to work through their differences together.”
Elliott has been successful in finding consensus on other difficult issues, such as Atlanta’s historic preservation ordinance.
“My role in this is not as an expert on trees. It is as a process expert — someone who has had experience mediating complex disputes,” Elliott said.
Currently, Elliott is conducting interviews with various stakeholders, including representatives from the tree preservation community and developers. In January, a working group of about 15 people will be formed that will include tree advocates, developers, city representatives, housing affordability and equity leaders. They will meet every couple of weeks for four months and then present their work to the administration of Mayor Dickens and the Atlanta City Council.
“Any process like this will come up with a lot of different ideas on how we can protect trees while enabling development,” Elliott said.
With all the false starts and stops, a great deal of work has been done to narrow the issues and find ways to protect existing trees while allowing for more dense development and housing affordability.
Tree advocates Kathryn Kolb and Howard Katzman have been hard at work on proposed amendments to the existing ordinance with the goal of the city prioritizing its most valuable trees.
They recently took me on a tour to show me what works and what doesn’t. Plans for one house in Kirkwood were flipped to save a white oak that was more than 100 years old. Around the corner, they showed me a subdivision where an old-growth forest was clear-cut for a suburban-style development. A solution would be to encourage conservation subdivisions allowing developers to build cluster homes so that priority trees can be saved.
“We are not going to stop development. We are not going to stop people from building nice houses,” Kolb said. “All that’s going to happen is that we are going to have more trees standing. A good tree ordinance would give the arborist and the builder a solid foundation on which to stand to make common-sense decisions. We want to give the builder a sustainable footprint with a requirement to save the high-priority trees.”
Katzman said the problem with the current ordinance is developers look for ways to accommodate a house on a lot rather than building a house to accommodate the lot and its existing trees.
The city’s arborists are also stretched thin, and it’s generally accepted that the city needs to hire more. It also would help to revise the when and how site plans are reviewed. It’s better to plan to save trees on the front end before builders have spent significant dollars on architectural designs.
“Right now, the arborist who reviews a site plan is not the same person who goes out on site,” Kolb said. “It would make more sense is to have the arborists who are reviewing plans to go out and do site visits of the plans they’ve reviewed.”
Elliott said it’s important to note that strengthening the city’s tree ordinance will not be enough to get Atlanta’s tree canopy up to 50 percent. Other city departments need to be at the table, including the Department of Watershed Management, the Atlanta Department of Transportation and the Department of Parks and Recreation, which oversees trees on public property, including street trees along sidewalks.
“Our primary purpose is to amend the tree ordinance,” Elliott said. “There’s a larger question about tree enhancement, such as where street trees can go. Certainly, we hope we shed light on not just the tree ordinance but the question of how trees are maintained throughout the city.”
Policies are meaningless without enforcement. The tree ordinance hasn’t been enforced. That takes money, and the empowering of arborists with the ability to say no.
Thank you, Maria, Kathryn and Howard for keeping this critical issue on the table. The time is now to pass a balanced Tree Ordinance to save the valuable trees still standing. Please !
Thank you for this encouraging article! The proposed recommendations sound reasonable and beneficial. Let’s make it easy for people to do the right thing! I had to work hard to save a few trees near my home.
https://saportareport.com/atlantas-trees-are-more-vulnerable-when-the-citys-arborists-arent-out-in-the-field/columnists/maria_saporta/
The streetcar extension and Beltline Rail will kill how many trees?
If transit is needed in neighborhoods of the Beltline, let’s optimize use of the existing roads and sidewalks for transit and let the Beltline continue to serve as green space and the parkland it has become.
“More Marta” dollars should not involve removing trees and laying rail to separate the Beltline neighborhoods much the same way the interstate sliced through the center of the city. Let’s not do that again. It was a bad idea.
In our ordinance and its enforcement, we also need to be thoughtful about the trees being planted to be sure we’re putting the right trees in the right places. Invasive tree species are a real problem that should not be esteemed for their esthetic or cultural value simply because they are pretty or provide precious shade. Not many who’ve been voluntarily planting many of Atlanta’s trees for more than 25 years may even realize that, like kudzu, some of those good, heartfelt intentions are sprouting a new generation of non-native species that will certainly daunt tomorrow’s citizens and urban forestry advocates.
I’m sorry, but this article feels like it was written by somebody who doesn’t live anywhere near the city and hasn’t been paying attention to the news. How did Maria Saporta of the Saporta report manage to write an entire article about Atlanta’s rapid loss of tree canopy without saying anything about the most striking blow our canopy has suffered over the last 2 years due to gross negligence: the decision of the City to do a 180° on its 2017 promises from Reed’s Planning Department to protect the woods around Intrenchment Creek Park — the city’s wetland, a forest with established old growth trees, one of “the four lungs of Atlanta” according to the City as advised by ecologists and urban planners, and essentially the headwaters of the South River, one of the state’s main rivers? Instead of doing with the City promised it would do, (and as the Saporta Report reported on, you can look up the article) they sold off that huge piece of land to Ryan Millsap of Blackhall and Shadowbox Studios (sound dystopian enough?) to build a massive soundstage, and to the Atlanta Police Foundation to build the largest police training facility in the US (as if sacrificing a lung is imperative to building these two monstrosities). People have been protesting this for YEARS now. They have been thwarted at every turn by corruption, with the city even refusing to bring the issue of to a vote after local citizens brought 116,000 Atlanta voter signatures to the table and checked off all the boxes to bring this to a referendum. How could SaportaReport omit something so glaring? You will find the answer if you scroll down this page: Saporta Report’s sponsors are the same companies investing in the “Cop City” project. Coca-Cola, Delta airlines, AT&T, Home Depot, Norfolk Southern, PNC, the list goes on. I shared this article with these notes to my colleagues, because I can never take this publication seriously again. People talk about how we just want evenhanded news and yet we have reporters who have sold their souls so blatantly to be in someone’s back pocket and manufacture ignorance at our expense. If you are a fellow reader reading this, hope I have demonstrated how this is a intentional omission or at least made you curious about what other deception goes on in “distinguished” papers, thanks to quid pro quos you and I are not privy to. AJC is very much corrupt in the same way as SR, judging by their financial interests and glaring omissions when they talk about Atlanta’s tree canopy — this is not an isolated incident, its the steady, wholesale evaporation of democracy blowing away quietly with the wind.
It’s perplexing to say that developers are the best to design improvements to the ordinance. Developers have ZERO INCENTIVE to improve the tree ordinance since they have full latitude to clearcut single family lots now. Maybe the meetings Elliott is organizing can get some traction but why wait to pass the most basic amendments proposed by Kolb and Katzman that at least fix a few of the gaping loopholes under the current ordinance? It will take another year at the very least to digest the new input and draft yet again another set of amendments. Why can’t the city council show it is serious about the massive tree loss we area ecperiencing and pass the short list of amendments NOW? Most of the amendments on the short list were already suggested by the City Planning Dept. over 3 years ago.