By Mike Rifkin
An incident involving two 125-year-old maple trees in Centretown has brought attention to the City of Ottawa’s practices for removing public trees.
Mayor Bob Chiarelli intervened to temporarily save two trees that were to be chopped down. The silver maple trees, located on city property in front of a residence on 297 Cooper St., were to be removed after a resident complained they were damaging his house’s foundation.
Chiarelli said the healthy trees will stay until City Council reviews its policy on removing city trees.
The City of Ottawa owns more than 200,000 trees on public property. The bylaws protecting the trees in Ottawa are left over from the former municipalities.
In 2001, council established the Ottawa Forests and Greenspace Advisory Committee. It advises council on how to maintain the city’s trees. According to the OFGA, in many cases it is not trees that cause foundation damage, but the shrinking of soil and clay around the tree.
Before the city will remove a tree because of foundation damage, the property’s owner must prove that there is Leda clay in the ground. This type of clay is prone to shrinking if there are trees nearby. If there is Leda clay in the ground, city inspectors check to see if it is the tree or other factors causing the clay to shrink. If the tree is responsible, the city inspectors will look for other options besides removing the tree.
Other cities in Canada have bylaws that protect both public and private trees from being axed.
In Toronto, citizens must get a permit to cut down healthy trees more than 30 cm in diameter. Someone wanting to remove a tree must also give the city a report from an arborist saying why the tree needs to be removed. The permit costs $100 but the fee may be waived if the citizen plants a new tree.
“We have very few requests like that,” says Toronto city forester Richard Ubbens. “It’s usually not the homeowner calling us, it’s usually us saying to the homeowner the tree needs to come down.
“Our policies are very much oriented to keeping the tree as long as we can in a healthy and safe condition. If we had a large city tree growing next to a house and an engineer gave us information that unless we removed the tree the wall is going to fall, we are allowed to remove the tree.”
Ubbens says Toronto removes trees on a “hazard priority basis” and that it sometimes takes up to 18 months to remove a tree that needs to be removed.
The City of Vancouver does not remove public trees unless they are dead or dying.
“Our policy is that we don’t do that,” says Terri Clark of the City of Vancouver Park Board.
Vancouver has 124,000 on public property and only removes about 1,200 each year.
The city’s street tree bylaw protects trees on both public and private property and requires citizens to obtain a permit to remove older trees from private property. Any tree with a diameter greater than 20 cm is protected by the by-law, meaning citizens must pay $45 and plant a tree to replace the old one.
“The City of Vancouver encourages the retention of trees whenever possible” is written on the application to remove a tree.
In Regina, the city will not remove a live tree unless the parks and recreation board considers it a hazard. Someone seeking to have a tree removed to renovate property must have an application approved by the superintendent of urban forestry. The applicant must pay part of the cost of having the tree removed.
Halifax, known as the “city of trees,” is still recovering from the damage of a 2003 hurricane and is planting more trees than it’s removing, says communications manager John O’Brien.
“We’re in the business of planting trees more than taking them down,” says O’Brien. “We’re putting 500 trees per year in the next four years.”
O’Brien says Halifax’s policy is they do not take down trees that are not diseased or dying upon request from citizens.
“If it’s not touching their house we wouldn’t cut it down,” he says. “It’s our property.”
In situations where a public tree is damaging private property, a citizen must pay a fee of $100 in order to have the tree removed. Halifax does not have any regulations for trees on private property.