The number of healthy trees permitted for removal by the City Arborist Division surged by 40% in 2023, leading to a 121% increase in annual tree loss since 2020.
(Click on the image below to enlarge.)
The actual growth in permitted healthy tree loss could be even higher, as data prior to the 3rd quarter of 2022 might have been inflated due to a programming error that double-counted trees when a Plan Review permitted trees in more than one quarter.*
The City Planning Commissioner, Jahnee Prince, has requested that the Arborist Division stop publishing tree loss data going forward until the Accela program team releases their new, interactive dashboard format for quarterly reports. While we are delighted that efforts are underway to provide the public more user-friendly access to tree data, it is now five months after their initial projected release date, and there's no release date in sight. This delay is particularly concerning as we are currently in the midst of the Phase 2 Tree Ordinance Rewrite without access to the most recent or corrected historical data.
Where Are We Losing the Most Trees?
As the 2023 quarterly reports were being released, we noticed a record high of tree loss in the 3rd quarter and asked Arboricultural Manager, David Zaparanick, to investigate if some of these trees might not have been lost on larger commercial and multi-family housing projects. David provided the following information for the first three quarters of 2023 but has not yet given details for the 4th quarter of 2023. The information he provided shows that the majority of trees are coming down on just a handful of commercial and multi-family housing projects.
Our Tree Ordinance currently focuses on preserving trees on lots zoned as single-family residential, which account for 70% of our tree canopy. However, this focus misses that the majority of our tree canopy loss is now happening on non-single family residential developments, and we may need to strenghten the Tree Ordinance's protection in those zoning categories.
We are unable to delve deeper into the quarterly report data to identify trends based on location or project type for tree removal. The only tree-permitting data publicly available is the Accela permitting database which allows us to look up the tree loss by individual permit only.
Here is a description of the larger projects that caused the most significant tree loss in the first three quarters of 2023:
1st Quarter:
In total, 62% of the trees that were permitted to be removed in the first quarter were on just five properties.
2nd Quarter:
In total, 47% of the trees that were permitted to be removed in the second quarter came from a single project at Tyler Perry Studios.
3rd Quarter:
In total, 69% of the trees that were permitted to be removed in the first quarter were on just three properties:
*It was discovered in the summer of 2022 that whenever additional trees were added to a Plan Review (construction) permit in a quarter following the quarter the initial permit was issued, the subsequent quarterly report recounted all the trees that had been permitted the prior quarter. Also, there were some trees removed for infrastructure purposes were left off the quarterly reports. The Arborist Division was supposed to have the data for all quarters prior to 3rd quarter 2022 corrected and republished by year-end 2023. As of May 2024, that data still has not been corrected and no data has been released for the most recent quarter (1st quarter of 2024).