Miami already short on shade trees. Plan would make it easier to remove them, activists say
Tree lovers in Miami are up in arms about a potential change to the city’s code that they say would make it easier to cut down trees — a potential blow to the city’s own goal of increasing its total canopy coverage.
On Thursday, District 1 Commissioner Miguel Gabela, who sponsored the item, agreed to defer it again — punting off the conversation until at least January.
Gabela, who represents Flagami, Allapattah and parts of Little Havana, has said the measure was intended to streamline an onerous permitting process for his residents. At a recent town hall on the issue, the commissioner said he had repeatedly heard from residents facing high fees or fines to cut down trees on their own property.
“There is no intention to do anything sinister,” he told the Miami Herald. This is about reducing red tape in the city, he said.
However, advocates say those concerns are already addressed in the city code, and the changes he’s proposed would have a far bigger impact than alleviating a financial burden for low-income residents.
“That’s like me getting a speeding ticket because I drove too fast and wanting to remove the speed limit,” said Sandy Moise, director of policy for the Urban Paradise Guild, a local group that advocates for nature-based solutions to climate change.
The draft ordinance Gabela has put forward makes several key changes to what kinds of trees homesteaded property owners (meaning people who live primarily in the property they own) can cut down without a permit. The new proposal would allow homeowners to down trees with trunks smaller than 18 inches in diameter, anything wrecked by a hurricane or during hurricane cleanup, anything considered diseased or damaged and anything non-native — a massive expansion of current policy. Currently, homeowners generally need a permit to cut down any of those types of trees.
Advocates are particularly up in arms about another change, which would allow homeowners the right to cut down a tree if it is in the way of where they’d like to place building materials, like a stack of bricks or loads of lumber.
But perhaps the biggest change is a shift in who is allowed to cut down trees without a permit. Under Gabela’s proposal, “owner-builders” and homesteaded property owners would now have the same rights — to cut down anything but a specimen tree without a permit.
Moise and others argue that this is a backdoor for developers, who are known to buy and clear-cut lots in lush Coconut Grove before building new homes and selling them off.
“It clearly, clearly is a development-friendly ordinance disguised as an ordinance to protect Commissioner Gabela’s residents from hefty fines,” Moise said.
At the Thursday commission meeting, Melissa Tapanes Llahues, president of the Builder’s Association of South Florida, addressed commissioners about the since-deferred item and confirmed she has worked with Commissioner Gabela on the item.
“I just want to let everyone know that we’re working with the commissioner’s office to make it reasonable for both developers and property owners,” she said. “We just want to make sure that there is reasonableness.”
Tapanes Llahues also told commissioners she wanted the city’s ordinance to match Miami-Dade County’s, which is actually weaker than the city’s.
The furor over the potential new ordinance drew county attention to Dinner Key back in October, when Gabela first introduced the concept. Commissioner Raquel Regalado appeared at city hall to warn commissioners that, after reviewing the new ordinance, county officials found issues with the city’s current ordinance it hadn’t noticed before.
“While we’re in accordance with most of it, there are about five points that cause us concern and we don’t want it to trigger unintended consequences,” she said.
Another big shift in the proposed ordinance involves a fund that developers and homeowners pay into if they don’t have the space to replant enough replacement trees on their property — the tree trust fund.
The new ordinance would shift control of the fund from the city’s building department to the city manager’s office, and earmark 20% of it for maintenance of existing trees and public education on the value of trees.
Former District 2 Commissioner Ken Russell, now an advisor for the Sierra Club on advocacy around this issue, said watering down the use of the fund will result in fewer trees planted.
“Once you filter it out into multiple departments it loses its concentrated effect,” he said. “This ordinance really just eliminates all protection for trees.”
Teeth from the toothless
With or without the new changes, data show that the city of Miami is having a hard time holding on to its trees.
The city flunked its 2009-set goal of achieving 30% canopy by 2020. As of a county assessment from 2021, Miami has about 18% tree canopy city-wide — nearly the same as it was 15 years ago.
“What is very clear, when you look at the data, is we’re not meeting our benchmarks,” said Christopher Baraloto, director of Florida International University’s International Center for Tropical Botany. “We’re at best stagnating and in many neighborhoods are going backwards.”
In a presentation to the city’s Climate Resilience Committee last month, Baraloto showed how even the city’s current replanting strategy isn’t cutting it.
As an example, he pointed to a recent project on Brickell Avenue, where developers cut down 206 trees, replanted 308 and paid $281,000 into the Tree Trust Fund. By his calculations, even after 20 years, the canopy of the new trees would only offer 57% of the shade as the original trees.
That’s because big, old trees are worth way more than small, young ones, Baraloto said. Those spreading branches and leave provide the shade that cools the neighborhood, the root systems that suck up excess flood water and the aesthetic beauty.
“It’s always an argument that we took out 50 trees but we planted 150, but people need to realize that that’s not enough,” he said. “There is a very high value to larger trees. Larger trees cannot be replaced by multiple smaller trees.”
Baraloto’s team has had climate stations running for five years straight throughout the city of Miami, measuring the temperatures under trees and near them. So far, they suggest that trees are cooling streets down an average of 6 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit. In areas with fewer trees, that number is even higher.
The new changes proposed by Gabela would not help this problem, Baraloto said.
“We have [an ordinance] that’s ineffective at improving our urban tree canopy, and there’s little to suggest this would improve it, and much to suggest that it worsens it,” he said.
Miami Herald Staff Writer Tess Riski contributed to this article.
Correction: An earlier version of the article incorrectly referred to Melissa Tapanes Llahues as president of the Latin Builder’s Association, instead of the Builder’s Association of South Florida. It also incorrectly stated rules about who needs permits to cut down trees.
This story was originally published December 12, 2024 at 5:05 PM.
