Paying A Fee Instead Of Planting Replacement Trees

In several of these cities, yes. Garland runs a City Reforestation and Tree Management Fund with a published rate. Plano allows a developer to pay a fee to the city in lieu of tree replacement, subject to approval. Dallas takes cash into a Reforestation Fund. It's a real route rather than an obscure one, and it's the option most owners never hear about.

One hundred and fifty dollars per diameter inch. The ordinance sets it as one hundred percent of the cost of replacement trees, based on the cost of three-inch caliper trees totaling the mitigation caliper inches required, moved to and installed on the site. So the fee is priced as what the planting would have cost the city, not as a discount on it.

Sometimes, and rarely by much, because the fee is usually calculated as the cost of doing the planting. What actually moves the decision is whether your site can absorb the trees at all. A heavy obligation on a site with no room for it is where a fee earns its place, not a preference for writing a check.

In Garland, materially less. The fee in lieu is one hundred and fifty dollars per diameter inch and the civil penalty for removing or injuring a tree in violation is two hundred and fifty. Doing it properly and paying is roughly sixty percent of the cost of doing it wrongly and being caught, which is a rare case of the numbers being that explicit.

Into a dedicated fund in each case. Garland's is a City Reforestation and Tree Management Fund. Wylie's penalty receipts go to a special account supporting supplemental landscape planting in public areas. Dallas runs a Reforestation Fund and also offers a Sustainable Development Incentive allowing mitigation reductions for qualifying practices.

Plano allows it. Replacement planting may go in rights-of-way, medians, on private open space areas, or in public park land, with the approval of the Director of Planning or designee. That's worth knowing before concluding a site is too tight to plant, because off-site placement sits between full on-site planting and paying a fee.

Garland has one very few people use. To preserve significant trees inside a proposed parking area, the Planning Director or designee may approve a reduction of not more than ten percent in the number of required parking spaces. Trading parking count for canopy is unusual in this market and it's written into the ordinance.

When the trees would have been worth having. A fee discharges an obligation and leaves the property with less canopy, less shade over parking and less screening than it started with. On a site where those things carry value, planting keeps an asset and paying buys a receipt.