Hey, residents of Buckhead and elsewhere in the city of Atlanta: now is the time to provide your opinion on the city’s tree protection ordinance as officials draft an update to it.
That was the message Tuesday from Trees Atlanta in its report at the Buckhead Council of Neighborhoods virtual meeting titled “Lunch and Learn: What’s Proposed for Atlanta’s New Tree Protection Ordinance?”
According to the city’s website, the Atlanta tree protection ordinance was to be updated in 2021. But after it failed to get support, the Department of City Planning opted to take an incremental stance on revising the ordinance.
The first phase of updates was approved in December 2022 and took effect in April 2023. The second phase is being drafted now, and is expected to be passed in April.
“We’re doing this not [just] because trees are beautiful but because trees are critical to all manners of infrastructure,” said Judy Yi, Trees Atlanta’s director of marketing and outreach. “However, we’re losing trees at an alarming rate. The number of trees for removal has doubled in the last four years.”
Atlanta’s tree canopy
Yi was one of three Trees Atlanta employees to speak at the meeting. Trees Atlanta is a nonprofit that defends and improves the city’s urban forest by planting, conserving, and educating.
The city council wants to have a new draft of the ordinance by April 1. The public comment period is Jan. 30 to mid-March. Phase 2 is addressing more issues that developers and tree advocates disagree on.
“What we’re seeing is the tree protection ordinance is really addressing the removal of trees from developments,” Yi said. “[Atlanta is] leading the [metro area] in the number of approved building permits. So we need an ordinance that can protect trees as a natural resource. … We want to protect the natural infrastructure while allowing development to move forward.”
Regarding climate change, she said there’s an urban heat island effect that happens when there are less trees and greenspace. This allows the heat to cause problems such as record high temperatures and people getting heat-related illnesses. She said the areas of the highest urban heat island hotspots are the regions where there are the fewest trees.
The city’s tree canopy loss, according to recent urban tree canopy assessments, was 47.9% in 2008, 47.1% in 2014, 46.5% in 2018, 45% in 2023, and unknown this year.
Yi called Phase 1 “low-hanging fruit” because it had items everyone wanted. They included: planting specifications (soil area and soil volume, spacing of trees), species diversity requirements, tree protection during construction (chain link fencing for front yard), parking lot requirements (16 spaces or more), survival or replanting of replacement trees for the life of a commercial property, removal of invasive vine species required to be counted as saved, site selection for public projects require early review by the city arborists, and a provision of $200,000 to assist with removal of dead, dying or hazardous trees.
Phase 2 requests
The Phase 2 updates will include recompense, tree preservation and density, affordable housing, and the tree trust fund, all key issues that still remain with the ordinance, Yi said.
“Overall, the concepts were addressed, but once we received the final document in January from a neighborhood planning unit, this is where we landed,” she said. “We asked for five changes to the earlier draft. Some made it in the earlier draft and some did not.”
First, the recompense was to be set to $260 per inch. The city got an A- grade for that part. The $260 value was assessed using 2019 costs.
Tree preservation standard and tree density requirements on single-family residential got a B from Trees Atlanta. The organization said this portion is missing a preservation standard for commercial properties, including multi-unit residential properties.
Trees Atlanta gave the city an F for the tree trust fund portion. “We think there are some easy changes to improve it to a C or B, but the changes currently are not preferential to the city,” Yi said. “It could represent an additional $1 million to $1.5 million on staffing alone.”
Trees Atlanta says public trees should be treated the same as private ones in terms of use and fees (the offset format).
Trees Atlanta gave the city an F for the fact that public removal can be “offset” by activities other than planting or payment. Its analysis includes four issues that are missing from the ordinance.
“With the ‘offset,’ we lose parkland but we can’t buy more land,” Trees Atlanta Executive Director Greg Levine said.
The organization gave the city a D grade for the 50% and 100% recompense waivers for affordable housing developments. Its analysis includes three issues still missing from the ordinance.
Trees Atlanta gave the city a C grade for the close gaps in tree protection. This section addresses how the new ordinance doesn’t allow for some of the rules that were in the previous ordinance.
How to submit comments
Following the presentation, there was a Q&A in which attendees could type in their questions via the Zoom comments section. However, because the presentation ran a bit long and the meeting was limited to an hour, not all questions were answered then. In a phone interview Wednesday, Levine answered buckhead.com’s question about Buckhead’s tree canopy.
“Buckhead has a higher tree canopy than the overall canopy for Atlanta, but it’s also losing trees at a very rapid rate,” he said. “Through canopy assessments, we know that Buckhead is also amongst the neighborhoods with the highest rate of canopy loss due to large single-family lots being subdivided and/or becoming subdivisions. Many creeks in Buckhead are overflowing their banks, flooding the neighborhoods as a result of the canopy loss and an increase in impervious surfaces caused by development. Buckhead does have a lower amount of parks than the rest of the city, along with the southwest.”
“Also, subdividing larger properties is one of the challenges we’re seeing in Buckhead.”
Levine mentioned a 30-acre property that was owned by Lucinda Bunnen, a photographic artist who died in 2022, could be transformed into a park once the city acquires it. At the Feb. 13 council of neighborhoods meeting, Justin Cutler, commissioner of the Atlanta Parks and Recreation Department, said the city and its public and private partners have raised $10.5 million so far and hope to close on the land in September.
Regarding Phase 2 of the ordinance, residents can submit their opinions on the ordinance by emailing treeordinance@atlantaga.gov, an email address included on the city’s website. Trees Atlanta also recommended resident contact David Zaparanick of the city’s arborist division (dzaparanic@atlantaga.gov and 404-865-8489), Keyetta Holmes, office of the zoning director (kmholmes@atlantaga.gov, 404-330-6145), Department of City Planning Commissioner Jahnee Prince (contact Nicole Jenkins at snjenkins@atlantaga.gov or 404-330-6037), Department of City Planning Deputy Commissioner Janide Sidfall (contact Kina Laster at klaster@atlantaga.gov or 404-546-1965) or the city council (citycouncil.atlantaga.gov/).
