City's canopy is a defining feature, but for some homebuilders it comes at a cost

If the Cellon Oak could talk, it could tell of picnics a century ago beneath its broad canopy and, before that, of native people who hunted the hardwood hammock north of where Gainesville lies today.

It is the largest known live oak — quercus virginiana — in Florida, one of 30 champion trees of various species in Alachua County. Only Miami-Dade County has more trees notable for their size. While towering oaks get the most notice, Alachua County has five national champion threes — the largest of their species in the United States.

Gainesville residents love trees, especially old and big trees. When Lee Malis recently fought City Hall and developers to preserve an oak, he was not the first. And he was not alone — others rallied to his cause.

It was not a surprise to Michael Andreu, associate professor of the University of Florida’s School of Forest Resources and Conservation with a specialty in urban forests.

“People talk about trees, are interested in trees, love trees,” Andreu said. “It can be very emotional. Spiritual, even. People engage in trees at all different levels.”

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Malis’ tree was saved — though considerably pruned — but many others are not. A 2016 survey by UF for the city shows the valued, vaunted tree canopy so prized in Gainesville — a designated Tree City by the Arbor Day Foundation — has lost about 11 percent of its cover from 1996.

Citizens clearly feel passionate about preserving nature. Over the past two decades, they have increased their property taxes and now their sales taxes to allow the county to protect more than 24,000 acres, including Serenola Forest, a prized buffer between Gainesville and Paynes Prairie that was purchased earlier this month.

Tropical storms have wiped thousands of trees countywide, including lots of the massive water oaks that are part of the character of the city’s oldest neighborhoods.

Development has also razed tens of thousands of trees in the city. Big trees are replaced with small ones.

“It is something to be concerned about for sure as urban forest managers,” said Matthew Mears, the city’s arborist, said of the thinning canopy. “To some degree development is always going to change the face of the landscape, but I think our tree ordinance is our best possible tool for creating balance. We want all these things like economic development, and to improve the quality of life through development, but we also want to balance that with the quality of life we get through our urban forest.”

Gainesville is developing a new urban forest management plan that will set goals for the next 20 years. It will include thoughts and ideas from the public and will be reevaluated every five years to determine what is working, what is not and what changes can be made.

Both Gainesville and Alachua County have ordinances that regulate trees in regard to development. Generally, the laws require developers who want to cut certain trees to pay mitigation money that is used by the city and county to plant new trees or buy land for conservation. The rules also cover what developers can plant on the property on which they are building.

The bigger and older the tree, the costlier the mitigation. Take the Malis tree as an example.

Malis lives on the corner of Northwest Third Avenue and Seventh Terrace. A centuries-old water oak that is almost 60 inches in diameter is on the backside of his property — he contends it is in his yard.

An apartment complex is being built on adjacent property and the developer intended to take down the oak, claiming the company bought the land on which the oak sits.

Questions over property ownership aside, it would have cost about $48,000 in mitigation to chop the tree down. Ultimately, the owner decided against it and reconfigured the layout of the complex.

Meanwhile, Alachua County Habitat for Humanity was awarded a lot for a new home by the city, which acquired the property in the Duval neighborhood and tore down the old home on it.

Habitat Executive Director Scott Winzeler said the property has a heritage oak in a location that would make building a new home impossible without disturbing its roots. So Habitat has proposed cutting the tree, but the mitigation fee would make it too expensive to build on the site.

“Unfortunately, the prudent thing to do would be to take the tree down. It’s gotten to the point where there is some question whether it would be feasible to take it down. We’re trying to work it out to see what we could do,” Winzeler said. “The fee is a lot of money. It would probably stop us from building if we had to pay that fee. It’s being reviewed. The city has been very accommodating to us and we are working with the tree mitigation committee.”

Former city arborist Meg Niedhofer said Habitat is facing the mitigation fee because of a change of interpretation of the tree code. Previously the loss of a high-quality heritage tree on a single-family or duplex lot could be mitigated with replacement trees on an "inch-for-inch" basis rather than paying a fee.

Now, however, those vacant lots could be be considered a subdivision and the city could require mitigation money even if the lot once had a home on it — for instance, a house that burned down and was being replaced, Niederhofer said.

"I was incensed to hear about this change. It represents a departure from the tradition of 40 years of code interpretation regarding the exemption for single-family and duplex housing lots," Niederhofer said in an email. "Why would a city want to slam a family whose home burned down with a $30,000 fine?"

City and county ordinances allow “regulated” trees, including champion and heritage trees, to be eliminated but at a high cost.

While a champion is the biggest tree of its kind in the state or nation, a heritage tree is one that is notable for its size or significance in other ways. The state maintains a list of more than 500 trees — champions, former champions and challengers. Alachua County has 55 on that list, the most next to Miami-Dade that has 106.

Revenue from the mitigation fee is used to plant new trees or to acquire land to preserve the trees on it. A recent example of that is the Gainesville Commission’s decision to join with the county to buy the 711-acre Weiss property tract where U.S. 441 and Northwest 43rd Street merge.

“You might buy acreage that has 100 high-quality heritage live oaks on it. If you think about planting trees and waiting for them to mature to provide all those benefits, it will be longer,” Mears said. “(Weiss) has a lot of different ecotypes, all of which are going to contribute to water quality and wildlife habitat. That’s one of the ways the use mitigation can have the biggest impact.”

But satellite images of tree cover in the 2016 survey show the biggest loss of trees is in the urban areas of Gainesville.

Gainesville owns several nature centers that include lots of forested acres. Those closest to urban Gainesville are Morningside Nature Center with 416 acres and Boulware Springs Nature Park at 106.

Trees are felled at some of these parks so others can be planted to try to recreate its historic ecosystem. Parts of Boulware, for instance, have been cleared to restore sandhill and upland pine habitats.

The lasting loss of tree cover is urban Gainesville. The city trying to strike a balance between tree requirements and denser development.

“With the way the city is developing and infill development...we see issues start to show up when trees are required to be installed in areas where the buildings are pushed out toward the street,” Mears said. “We start to see conflicts develop where we didn’t expect them to. There will be some experimentation over the next 10 years or so to figure out how to get those things right because we want accessible, livable, walkable urban spaces but we also want to figure out a way to preserve the tree canopy in those spaces. I think we have a really good ordinance, we just need to figure it out.”

Andreu, who is part of the UF team working with the city on the future tree plan, said it is imperative that the city develop it with the public in mind. It is also imperative, he said, that Alachua County government be involved.

Residents should have a major say in what the city will look like in terms of its tree canopy. The details of the plan should be based on firm knowledge about trees, Andreu said.

“We need to get a better understanding of how city residents value the tree canopy...We want (the plan) to be based on factual information on what citizens want,” Andreu said. “We want to let people know there will be an ongoing effort to engage and get them involved in it.”

Preserving the tree canopy does more than add beauty. The 2016 survey said it has a compensatory value of $1.4 billion. Its shade saves residents $7.7 million a year to cool homes. The cost of dealing with stormwater would be $3.8 million more a year without the canopy.

Andreu praised Gainesville’s long history of tree preservation activism but acknowledged that some residents are pained by trees — they cause allergies, they dust cars with yellow pollen, some drop spiked balls or squishy fruit and their roots can bust the foundations of homes.

Gainesville has an estimated 7.2 million trees — defined as a plant with woody stems at least one inch in diameter at breast height. They provide a canopy that covers 47 percent of the land with an average density of 178 trees per acre.

More than half of Gainesville’s urban forest is made up of loblolly pine, slash pine, laurel oak, water oak and red maple. More than 94 percent of the 173 species found in Gainesville are native to Florida.

And the trees that are standing are largely healthy — 80 percent are in excellent or good condition, 11 percent are fair and 9 percent are in poor condition or dead.

Mears said the city is trying to diversify the types of trees through the mitigation program.

“Trees that are installed when regulated trees come out have to be from a list of what we call high-quality species — natives that are robust but also diverse,” Mears said. “There is a selection that is good for maybe a winter environment or a drier, hotter environment. It allows people to choose what would work for their site. But its is limited. They couldn’t take out a big live oak and plant a crepe myrtle in its place or even a laurel oak.”