TREES.JPG

Trees can pose hazards and, as a result, require expensive cutting and cleanup.

(Stephanie Yao Long/Staff)

The distance between reality and Portland city government was charted over the last several months as planners sent out notices asking residents to shoulder the costs of cutting down and disposing of trees not on their individual properties but on city property nearby.

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Most residents know the sidewalk rule and of the city code making homeowners responsible for trees on strips of city-owned land fronting their properties. Few dispute that they are reasonably expected to know the condition of trees in such places if the public's safety is at stake.

But Kathleen Ward and Rita Snodgrass, among others, received written directives to remove two trees they didn't know about on a slice of city land along Southwest Multnomah Boulevard and more than 50 feet away from their Southwest Portland properties, Jessica Floum of The Oregonian/OregonLive reported. Neighbors John Matcovich and Carl Strough also received notices, and they cited to Floum a tree service's estimate exceeding $3,000.

It's hard to know what city planners were thinking. Ordering homeowners to spend money on remote tree removal, and threatening a $1,000 penalty and the placement of a lien against the homeowner's property, is beyond heavy-handed. It's out of bounds. It's potentially confiscatory. More than anything, it's a thoughtless shirking of the city's responsibility to serve the citizens who pay for government in the first place.

The proposed revisions caught city commissioners by surprise. Nick Fish pulled the proposed code from the Council's agenda for review. Mayor Ted Wheeler, whose Bureau of Planning and Sustainability had concocted the punitive measures, immediately went to work and fashioned amendments that bleach from a broader code update noxious elements such as remote tree removal. A Wheeler spokesman on Tuesday told Floum that the mayor intended to quash any effort to expand homeowners' responsibilities to care for trees on city-owned land.

The mayor's deft amendments, along with comprehensive code update, are to be heard and debated at Wednesday's Council meeting. Action won't occur till next week - unless an emergency declaration is declared, clearing the way for an immediate vote. But the Council should wait and get this right, showing its constituents it has the capacity to decipher unintended consequence and signal that government knows its place in the lives of Portlanders.

Portland loves its trees. Wisely, it curates a prolific canopy that works against the heating effects associated with urban "islands" while broadly contributing to the city's watershed health. Wisely, too, the city works to balance public safety with tree health. But City Hall's regulations governing tree care and tree removal are voluminous and fraught with potential complication. Even minute changes to the regulations can complicate rather than clarify best and equitable approaches ahead.

Editorial Agenda 2017

Boost student success

Get Oregon's financial house in order

Help our homeless

Honor our diverse values

Make Portland a city that works

Expand access to public records

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Read more about the editorial board's priorities for Oregon.

Trees sometime die, list, crack, fall and wreak damage. Responsibility for them, however, is not just arboreal. It's financial. Property lines, for example, constitute their own section of the tree code, and deciding where city lots begin and end helps bureaucrats know who should care for which tree.

The newest iteration of code had sought to create more regular lot lines, a rational action working well in inner Portland, owing to a grid of straight streets. But it's an irrational action when applied to the curvy streets of east and west Portland, potentially creating unfairness. Here again, Wheeler brings an amendment that removes a requirement by planners that adjusted property lines be at right angles to the street.

Tree code would be so much fine print of little consequence if its enforcement didn't in some cases mean hundreds, even thousands, of dollars to homeowners. Expansion and adjustments to it must be done in such a way as to close the gap between reality and city government.

-The Oregonian/OregonLive Editorial Board