In Portland “your trees are not your property”.
A letter to the Oregonian Friday 7/16/10:
I am one of the owners of an office building on Southwest First Avenue in Portland. The City Urban Forester has 
ordered us to cut down seven mature, healthy ash trees because they were pruned last fall without a permit.
We hired a licensed, bonded, and insured landscape company to do the pruning and our agreement with them indicated they were responsible for securing a permit from any government entity that required it. They, and other landscapers from whom we received bids for the job, told us there was no permit required for pruning street trees.
Consequently, the Urban Forester fined our landscaper $1,000 per tree, or $7,000 in total, for pruning without a permit and that sum was paid. The demand on us now is to have all the trees cut down, their roots ground and removed, and 2-inch trees planted to replace them. We are looking at around $15,000 to have this work done. The deadline now given us for tree removal is July 20.
Does the “punishment fit the crime” in this case? I think not. This is just one example of illogical and punitive rules and bureaucratic regulations that property owners in Portland have to face. No wonder there are so many “For Sale” and “For Lease” signs on office buildings all over Portland.
I attended an Urban Forestry Commission meeting at City Hall recently. Its stated mission is to “improve Portland’s urban forest in terms of overall canopy, forest health and benefits provided by the forest.” Isn’t the demand that we cut down seven large street trees, now filled with vigorous new green growth, and replace them with tiny trees in the fall, going to accomplish just the opposite result?
