ATHENS, Ohio — The Athens city administration is working to take away the Shade Tree Commission’s approval authority for major development projects and substantially reduce the number of trees required for new development projects.
Athens City Service Director Andy Stone told the Independent the changes are necessary to remove barriers for development and support businesses.
Shade Tree Commission members have objected, however, arguing that the move will benefit major developers at the expense of the city’s urban canopy.
Stone said the city administration hopes to begin advancing the changes through Athens city government next month. The proposed changes will ultimately require adoption by Athens City Council.
Shade Tree Commission Chair Tristan Kinnison said at a commission meeting and told the Independent that he learned from city officials that Mayor Steve Patterson would not reappoint members to the Shade Tree Commission until the council adopts the admin’s proposed changes.
Patterson told the Independent, “For me to reappoint someone at this point in time doesn’t make sense, because we’re still working through the process of consolidation, as opposed to expanding local government.”
Approval authority
Currently, the Shade Tree Commission must approve landscaping plans for major development projects that change land use, according to Athens City Code. Additionally, any developer that plans to deviate from city requirements on required canopy cover must seek approval from the Shade Tree Commission.
The Athens city administration is proposing changes to city code that would, in part, eliminate the commission’s approval authority. Athens City-Service Safety Director Andy Stone and David Riggs, director of code enforcement, prepared the suggested changes.
“What we’re proposing to change is, we’re moving [the Shade Tree Commission] from a regulatory body to an advisory body, and making the Planning Commission be the regulatory body,” Stone said in an interview.
In multiple instances, the city’s proposed changes would also transfer authority from the Shade Tree Commission to Stone’s office.
The changes are necessary, Stone said, because the Shade Tree Commission has been “an adverse entity to people that are coming through trying to do development.”
Likewise, Patterson said the city is “constantly being criticized for being a community that is obstructionistic for economic development.” He said one of the ways to address that “is you start to streamline the processes” while “maintaining the regulations that exist.”
Stone said, “There’s been a lot of consternation and confusion about how people can attempt to develop things when they’re going through multiple regulatory bodies.”
Stone did not offer direct examples of incidents in which the Shade Tree Commission has held up development, and he did not respond to follow-up questions from the Independent on the topic.
He referenced recent frustration from small businesses about economic development opportunities when discussing the need for the changes.
However, the Shade Tree Commission’s approval authority does not have much bearing on small businesses, said the commission’s chair Tristan Kinnison, since the commission’s approval authority only comes into play for land use changes.
The commission does, however, play an important role in making sure development aligns with city code, said Shade Tree Commission member Gene Deubler.
“Just in the last six months, we’ve had a few developers come to us for approval, who had … non-native invasive species on their planting lists, and who were planting significantly less trees than what was required by city code,” Deubler told the Independent. “Without us there as a fail‐safe, in a sense, they’re kind of able to just do whatever they want to do.”
Kinnison said he hasn’t seen the commission pose many barriers for development in the two years he’s been with the commission. He said the current set-up requires just one additional meeting for developers to attend — and argued it’s a good thing to have a meeting focused on environmental impact.
“The whole [Athens city] government talks about how we want to be sustainable, and we want to be focused on the environment,” Kinnison said. “And this is the only time that these large developers have to be in front of people that are prioritizing that rather than, ‘oh, is this going to be well suited to the business area’ or something like that.”
Kinnison said he does not expect the city’s Planning Commission to ignore canopy cover requirements in city code. However, he said, “The Planning Commission has to see a lot of different things, and they have a lot on their plate already. And we are a specialized volunteer commission with qualified people who are looking at this very narrow piece of city code and making sure that it’s done well.”
Kinnison said that both he and Deubler are certified arborists, and that the commission is well suited to provide specific advice, such as which tree species would do well where, that the Planning Commission may be unable to offer.
The revised process proposed by the city administration would still allow the Shade Tree Commission to review and provide input on landscape plans for major developments.
“Our Planning Commission does a pretty good job overseeing development and holding developers to standards,” said Stone. “I don’t think we need several bodies to do that.”
However, Deubler said at the Aug. 14 Shade Tree Commission meeting, “There’s no guarantee that those things that we recommend are confirmed or concrete, and anything that the developers are bringing to the table — they could change things behind our backs if they wanted to.”
“My biggest concern is that this just takes our teeth away entirely at a time when the city really needs to be focusing on our canopy health and the expansion of our canopy,” Deubler said. “There’s really no logical reason for taking this approval authority away from us.”
The changes were also discussed at the May 7 meeting of the Planning Commission, where Ohio University Professor of Environmental and Plant Biology Glenn Matlack said maintaining an independent commission’s authority over the city’s urban environment is the best way to ensure dedicated attention to the local environment.
“We’re currently in a phase of rapid climate change that expresses itself here in Athens in terms of increased frequency and severity of extreme heat events and more frequent flooding,” Matlack said. “Now, in Athens, we can’t control the climate of the whole planet, but we do have ways of dealing with a climate right here in Athens — fairly simple and cheap ways — and that involves planting street trees.”
Planning Commission member Chris Knisely told the Independent that while she understands the need to “streamline processes to make it encouraging of economic development,” the Shade Tree Commission is not “the only thing that’s slowing the process down.”
“I just want us to be careful that we respect the significance of having a shade tree commission in place,” Knisely said.
After the Planning Commission’s meeting in May, Knisely suggested modifying the proposed code changes, though without changing most of the city’s proposals to limit the Shade Tree Commission’s authority.
Kinnison submitted a proposal for alternative code changes to the city government in early May in an attempt to reach a compromise with the city government. However, Stone told the Independent the administration intends to proceed with plans to shift authority away from the Shade Tree Commission.
Asked about concerns from Shade Tree Commission members that the change would benefit developers at the expense of the city’s urban canopy, Stone told the Independent, “It’s a balance.”
“When people live together, close together, you have multiple land uses,” Stone said. “So, insofar as we can support the urban canopy and still live close together and support the various land uses, we want to do that.”
The Shade Tree Commission’s role in city government helps the city maintain recognition through Tree City USA, which Stone said the city has held for 40 years. That’s not changing, Stone said.
“We’re very proud of our history in promoting shade trees and proper species,” Stone added. “But we want to promote economic development. We want to promote small businesses, and when we make it hard for them to do things by not the standards, but by the process, and having to go before various entities, it just drags things out for them.”
Changes to canopy cover requirements and more
The city administration’s proposed code changes would change standards for urban canopy cover under Title 41, a section of city code which applies to major development projects.
Currently, city code requires that “one large shade tree or two medium sized shade trees shall be planted” for every 1,527 square feet of impermeable surfaces, like concrete, in development projects and for every 1,767 square feet of permeable surfaces, like dirt.
The revised changes would drastically reduce the number of tree plantings required to “one large or two medium shade trees for every 4,500 sf of developed area” regardless of surface type, according to the proposed code changes.
Stone said he did not recall why that change was suggested. The proposed code changes note that the suggested threshold would achieve a threshold of 40% canopy cover.
In a comment within the proposed code changes, Riggs, the city’s director of code enforcement, wrote, “Trying to simplify and meet the comprehensive plan of 40% tree cover.”
Kinnison, however, told the Independent that the math in the revised code is “hard to swallow.”
According to Riggs’s comment in the proposed changes, the math is based on the canopy cover that trees provide at maturity. However, Kinnison noted that trees are not planted at maturity, and many will not reach maturity at all — especially because developers do not always give trees on development projects the requisite care.
“It’s a very idealistic mathematics behind it,” Kinnison said.
He added that the Shade Tree Commission has not received pushback from developers on the canopy coverage requirement.
Riggs did not respond to a request for comment for this story by press time.
Various other changes are included in the city administration’s proposed changes to city code regarding tree cover and landscaping. The changes include shifting where tree plantings are required at certain development projects, requiring warning signs for pesticide use, and including invasive species on a section of code on noxious weeds.
Note: This story has been updated to include comments from Patterson.
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