We think it’s a positive sign that Denton City Council members want to see an emphasis on planting trees, but we can’t help wondering why they waited so long.
Some residents have been calling for officials to start hefting shovels to plant trees for quite some time now, but city leaders apparently weren’t listening.
Now it appears that part of Denton’s long-suffering tree code may finally see some fixes from the council, including a program to start replacing the city’s shrinking tree canopy.
In 2010, the city commissioned a study with the University of North Texas and learned that just 19 percent of the city was covered by tree canopy.
The situation may have grown worse in the four years since that study was done. Some local environmentalists who drive through town regularly and keep an eye on what’s happening have seen a lot of trees go down in recent years.
And don’t put all the blame on developers. Since 2004, developers have paid nearly $2.1 million into the city’s tree fund, at $125 per caliper inch of felled trees. But the city has not yet used the fund to plant trees.
City staff members presented options to the council at a workshop Tuesday afternoon that initially would have seen revisions to the ordinance by the end of next year, but council members showed little interest in waiting that long.
They told the staff to prepare some policy recommendations for the tree fund. The council itself would take up how the fund would be spent with an eye toward making the most of it, such as by leveraging other money or resources to preserve trees. But council members said they want to see an emphasis on planting trees.
Better late than never? We hope that’s true, but we fear that too much ground may have been lost to begin a quick recovery.
Denton’s newest urban forester, Haywood Morgan, told the council that the city’s current ordinance, on the books since 2004, isn’t easy to understand, and that may be contributing to its lack of acceptance by property owners and developers.
“To get a wide acceptance, it needs to be written in plain and simple language,” Morgan said.
We urge the City Council and other leaders to take Morgan’s words to heart and apply them to begin developing a solution to this challenge and some of the other problems facing the city.
Although the staff recommended another, more detailed study of the city’s tree population to help, council members said they would rather wait before commissioning another study. Instead, they want a committee to take up ordinance revisions at the same time the council takes up the tree fund spending policy.
They also told the staff to press ahead with work that had stalled on creating a tree trust provision.
The option may help preserve more canopy, but the city’s planning director, Brian Lockley, told the council that tree trusts alone wouldn’t be enough to replace the city’s shrinking canopy and that the ordinance needs to be rewritten, too.
City leaders, we urge you to address these vital projects. Too much time has been lost already.
And while you’re at it, it might be a good idea to start planting a few trees.
Some of those resident environmentalists we mentioned will probably be happy to show you how.
