Software aids town in creating a tree ordinance

As a resource conservation development coordinator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Gerald Miller is a champion of tree planting. But it was a family hint that ignited his drive to develop a tree ordinance for Ely, Nev.

“My father-in-law [was visiting from Canada], and I asked him, ‘How do you like Ely?’” Miller explains. “He said, ‘Nothing a few trees wouldn’t help.’” The comment planted a seed, and Miller set out to make his hometown one of the National Arbor Day Foundation’s Tree Cities.

The Tree City USA program was established by the Nebraska City, Neb.-based National Arbor Day Foundation (NADF) to encourage community tree planting and preservation. To obtain certification as a Tree City, communities must meet several criteria, including having a tree ordinance.

Ely had no such ordinance. Established in 1879, the town grew up around the copper mining industry, and tree preservation historically had taken a backseat to the area’s economic mainstay. That is not to say that Ely is averse to trees; but it does mean that, as the years passed, the town’s planting and maintenance practices were not guided by a set policy.

That began to change in 2000, when Miller attended an NADF conference and received a beta copy of TreeOrd software from St. Paul, Minn.-based Tree Trust. Containing more than 1,800 clauses from more than 200 model tree ordinances, the software serves as a resource for users who are writing their own ordinances. It addresses issues such as establishing a tree board, planning and zoning, tree inventory and maintenance.

“It’s nice to see what other people have done,” Miller says of the software. “You pick and choose what you like out of [the sample ordinances]. There’s a selection, just like going through a candy store.”

Working with Ely’s city attorney, a councilman and the mayor, Miller cut and pasted his way to an ordinance in a month. However, when the group presented the new ordinance to Ely’s council, the document met opposition.

Primarily, the council was wary of changing residents’ pruning practices, Miller notes. “Tree topping was the No. 1 controversy,” he explains. “There’s a lot of people who grew up with tree topping as a way of life. We couldn’t convince the city council that what they’d seen all their lives wasn’t right.”

Additionally, the council was concerned about the prospect of assigning liability for hazardous trees and requiring permits to work near trees. “It’s always been that, if you’ve got to go in there and fix a telephone cable, you just go do it,” Miller notes. “People didn’t want to increase the bureaucratic steps to do stuff.”

As the town debated the newly created tree ordinance, leadership changed, and the new mayor and council tabled the proposition. Nevertheless, the hearings surrounding the debate produced useful information for future plantings. “We all [learned] where and what types of trees the community wanted to plant by going through the initial hearings for this ordinance,” Miller says. “So we’re [planting] in public spaces and parks — places that are safe for trees, with no power lines and no underground concerns, and plenty of water available.”

The process had its lessons, too. “We wanted something simple, and we ended up with something close to 37 pages,” Miller notes. “You can cut and paste so much that you make the ordinance too complicated. Some things we just probably didn’t have to worry about.”

Since 2000, Miller has moved to Elko, where his job is based, but Ely is in his service territory. He is hopeful that a tree ordinance eventually will pass. “It’s still being talked about and still being thought about,” he says. “At the Arbor Day ceremony this year, everybody made a commitment to finish up the tree ordinance and get that on the books.”

In the meantime, he continues to use the ordinance software to assist other communities in crafting their tree programs. “With the software, we (the USDA staff) have been able to help communities develop their tree boards and their ordinances much easier than before,” he notes. “Using the software, we have started more tree ordinances than we had in all the years beforehand.”

For more information about tree planting programs and ordinances, visit the Web sites for NADF and Tree Trust at www.arborday.org and www.treetrust.org, respectively.