An Effort to Make the Tree Code More Reasonable Died With Commissioner Nick Fish

In 2019, a group of community advocates, industry groups, businesses and homeowners lobbied the city to soften parts of the Tree Code, which they said was inflexible and overly punitive and allowed few exceptions.

Things deemed unlawful by the Tree Code: “to plant, place, prune, alter, remove, destroy, cut, break or injure any tree without first obtaining a tree permit for said action.”

Commissioner Nick Fish’s staff was amicable to scaling back some of those rules. But after months of work and discussion, Fish became too ill with cancer to work. The group took their project to Mayor Ted Wheeler.

In a Dec. 23, 2019, letter to Wheeler, the group laid out the four “critical issues” with the Tree Code. Among them: “Provide flexibility in order to manage Title 11 requirements in unique situations. A one-size-fits-all approach does not work citywide.” They wrote that big pieces of the code “aren’t working in the best interest of our city and our tree canopy” and mentioned that residents were the ones having to navigate “intracity conflicts” between bureaus.

Maryhelen Kincaid, one of the architects of the letter, says the group never heard back from Wheeler.

“I’d say it to doctors, I’d say it to lawyers, I’d say it to a lot of professionals: They don’t understand what real people are thinking, and they don’t acknowledge their concerns,” Kincaid says. “It shouldn’t have been that hard.”