One Hundred Percent, Whatever The Size.
Most cities in this market band their replacement ratio, so what you owe depends on which size bracket a tree falls into. Carrollton doesn’t. Replacement is one hundred percent of the diameter removed, at every size.
What changes with size is the stock you have to plant it in. A 4 to 12 inch DBH tree is replaced at minimum three-inch caliper, greater than 12 up to 30 inches at minimum four-inch, and above 30 inches at minimum six-inch.
That makes Carrollton the easiest ordinance in this market to budget, because the percentage never moves. It also removes the timing game entirely: there’s no threshold to stay under, so no advantage in removing a tree before it grows into a worse band.
Three Provisions That Decide The Project
None of them is about the size of a tree, which is where most attention goes.
No Clear-Cutting At All
Chapter 155 opens with it: no clear-cutting of land is allowed. Not a threshold, not a ratio, a prohibition. Any approach that starts by clearing and sorts the trees out afterwards is unavailable here.
Damaging Counts As Removal
No person may cut down, destroy, remove or move, or effectively destroy through damaging, any tree without a permit. The trench and the haul route are covered by the same sentence as the saw.
Two Years Past Handover
A tree identified on the Tree Preservation Plan that dies within two years from the end of the project has to be replaced. The obligation outlives the contractor’s involvement by a comfortable margin.
The Two-Year Clause Is The Expensive One
Read quickly, it sounds like it covers the trees you planted. It also covers the trees you kept, which is a much larger exposure.
The replacement is owed at the same one hundred percent of diameter, and it’s sized on the tree that died rather than on anything you chose. So a mature specimen preserved on paper, damaged during construction and lost eighteen months later becomes an obligation sized on exactly the tree you were trying to save.
That timing isn’t arbitrary and it isn’t generous. Construction damage kills slowly: a compacted root zone or a severed root plate typically shows as thinning canopy and dieback one to three years afterwards. Two years lands squarely inside the window where the damage becomes visible, which is presumably the point.
Practically, it means protection during the build isn’t a box to tick for the inspection. It’s the thing standing between you and a bill that arrives after everyone has demobilized.
The Permit Never Travels Alone
A Carrollton tree removal permit isn’t a standalone application you can file when you get to it. Chapter 155 ties it to whatever else is happening: a development permit to fill or grade, a plat application, or on already-platted property a new construction permit or a zoning case.
It also has to be submitted in conjunction with a Tree Preservation Plan.
The effect is that the tree question arrives with the development rather than behind it, which is helpful if you planned for it and expensive if you didn’t. There’s no point in the process where trees are a separate conversation you can have later with somebody else.
Where The Replacements Go
Replacement trees are to be located on the subject site whenever possible. Where there’s genuinely no suitable location, the City Manager or designee may approve an alternative, and one of those is payment into the Tree Restoration Fund.
The city uses that fund for planting on public rights-of-way, park land and other municipally-owned property, and it must be spent within two years of the Council’s action on the request.
One constraint worth planning around before ordering stock: no more than 34 percent of the replacement trees may be of the same species when 12 or more are required. On a large obligation that rules out the cheapest option, which is one species bought in bulk, and it wants deciding at design stage rather than at the nursery.
The Instrument, City By City.
What each city actually uses to regulate a tree, taken from its own code. No two of these are the same document.
Plano
Article 17 of the Zoning Ordinance. The preservation plan IS the permit, replacement runs inch for inch from 8 to 30 inches and 1.5:1 above that, and a fee in lieu is available with the Director's approval.
Frisco
Subsection 4.01 of the Zoning Ordinance. A separate Tree Removal Permit, mitigation banded as a percentage of diameter removed from 0 to 300 percent, and a survey needing two seals rather than one.
Dallas
Article X, Landscape and Tree Conservation. Protected at 8 inches, mitigation waived across the development footprint up to 70 percent of the site, and topping defined and regulated by name.
Garland
A Tree Management Plan plus Removal Authorization, class-based replacement ratios from 2:1 down to 0.25:1, and a civil penalty of $250 per diameter inch.
Allen
Land Development Code Article VII. A credit ledger rather than a ratio, where removal costs exactly double what preservation earns, and a 90 day clock on the permit.
McKinney
Unified Development Code Article 4. Three protected tiers, mitigation doubling above 17 inches, and a perimeter zone beside existing housing where protected trees may not be altered at all.
Wylie
Zoning Ordinance Article 7. Enforced criminally as a misdemeanor at $100 per caliper inch, and protection is defined to exclude trees standing in easements, rights-of-way or the buildable area.
Richardson
No private-property tree ordinance at all. The tree chapter covers public trees only, which makes documentation the owner's protection rather than the city's.
- See All City Tree Ordinances