A PROBLEM WITH TREES
City and some residents at odds over removal, risk
PACIFIC GROVE >> Between wind, rain and city code, tree maintenance in Pacific Grove is tricky business. At least, that's according to a cluster of residents who have found themselves at odds with the city as they try, and often fail, to remove trees looming over their properties.
Christie Monson and Tim Calvert know the municipal battle well. With three, 50-foot-plus cypress trees in their front yard — and worries one or more will fall onto their home, especially amid consistently stormy weather of late — the Pacific Grove couple has been wrestling with the city to have the towering conifers removed.
So far, the city has denied the pair's request, maintaining the trees are healthy and don't need to come out.
But Monson and Calvert aren't convinced. Instead, they've started sleeping as far away from the trees as they could get, moving their bed from their front-of-house bedroom to a nook near the back.
“(It's) taken over our lives,” Monson said.
Calvert and Monson are not alone in their canopy qualms. Other Pacific Grove residents are facing a similar impasse, hoping to see trees on private property removed — primarily for reasons related to personal safety and comfort — but failing to secure the proper permitting to do so.
And with weeks, going on months of winter weather bringing high winds and repeated rain to the region, unease is as salient as ever. The soil-saturating conditions, which are set to continue this weekend, make easy targets out of even the healthiest of trees.
“(It won't) take much to see something go down,” Roger Gass, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Monterey, said Tuesday, looking ahead to an atmospheric river event set to move through the region starting Thursday.
But taking out a tree in Pacific Grove isn't a simple, or cheap, venture, even with recent and upcoming storms rattling some roots — and nerves.
According to Pacific Grove Municipal Code, residents looking to remove a “protected tree” — which includes most private and public trees spotted around the city — must get permission from the city arborist. The same rules apply if a resident wants to “substantially prune” a tree, or remove any more than 25% of its live branches. In either case, a city-issued tree permit is required, a process that starts with residents seeking out their own independently prepared tree report .( Essentially, evaluation sofa tree's health, stability and, in turn, risk if left standing).
Those reports are then submitted to the city as part of an online tree permit application. The city arborist reviews applications and performs his own assessment of trees in question, ultimately deciding whether and under what conditions permits should be doled out. Per city code, the basis for removal relies on if a tree is dead, deemed high-risk, a detriment to or crowding a fellow protected tree nearby or considered a nuisance. If a tree hits one or more of those marks, it could be cause for removal.
But the buck really stops with the city arborist, as Calvert and Monson have come to find out.
The couple has lived in Pacific Grove for more than four years. Shortly after moving to the area, Calvert and Monson had the cypress trees housed on their new property inspected. That initial review, performed by a local certified arborist, rated three of four trees inspected in the couple's front yard as “high-risk” of failure.
Generally, a tree's potential to fail is evaluated on a hazard scale developed by the International Society of Arboriculture. Scores range from three to 12, the latter being the most dangerous. In 2018, three cypresses on Calvert and Monson's property rated a nine (a nine or higher on the ISA scale is considered high-risk). At the time, the evaluating arborist cited several concerns to back his determination including the trees being planted too close together; unbalanced pruning brought on by power lines bordering the trees on just one side; and evidence of termites, cavities and decay.
Equipped with the report, Calvert and Monson applied to have the cypresses removed, believing they had met all the necessary requirements to secure a permit. The city's code, for example, notes that “all permit applications for dead trees and high-risk trees with a potential failure rating of nine or above shall be removed in a timely manner…”
Their application was denied. It wasn't until recently, as torrential weather started tearing down trees around the county, that Calvert and Monson tried for removal again. In January, the pair enlisted two more certified arborists in town to conduct new tree reports. Evaluations were less exhaustive this time around and piggybacked on findings from 2018. Nevertheless, conclusions were the same: remove the cypresses.
Still, the city again dashed the couple's hopes for a tree permit, despite newly submitted reports upping debated trees' risk level to 10 and 11. In a written response to their request, the city arborist maintained that the “trees in question do not meet the standard requirement for high-risk or nuisance tree.”
January's denial left Calvert and Monson baffled. And scared. When storms reached their worst a couple months ago, Monson said she checked herself into Lover's Point Inn until winds calmed down. The stress, she said, was too much.
“You have to understand what it's like to live with a tree that's an 11 on a 12 scale,” Calvert added.
Calvert and Monson's palpable fear, which has pushed the couple to consider moving, begs the question: why would the city deny their application, and those similar? In short, it's complicated. According to current and former city officials, a tree report and subsequent rating from an independent arborist is where the tree removal process begins. From there, matters of preserving and protecting the environment, possibilities for risk mitigation rather than outright removal and the sheer depth of reports submitted to the city come into play.
Daniel Gho, Director of Public Works for Pacific Grove, explained that a problem the city finds with a lot of the independent arborist reports it encounters is that they are limited, in that they are just visual inspections.
Tree assessments range in scope and magnitude. The simplest inspections are just visual, where arborists look for obvious external calamities. More exhaustive evaluations of a tree's structural integrity require specialized tools and techniques to gauge if anything is going on internally. The higher level of inspection, the more accurate information becomes. For the city, that means just going off of hazard ratings decided off a simple visual inspection can be difficult.
“They are taking a look at (the tree) and then issuing these high hazard ratings. …We make decisions based on the facts that we have laid out in front of us. We can't make our judgments based on potential failure,” Gho said. “Trees fall. Most healthy trees could fall.”
Tree report issues are, in part, why the city denied Calvert and Monson's most recent tree permit application. The city deemed one report the couple submitted “contradicting and incomplete while being based on limited visual only” and the other too reliant on “antiquated” findings from 2018.
Beyond adequate reports, a tree must also prove hazardous enough to outweigh the impact of removing it.
“The city has to look at risk and what would be the result of that tree being removed,” explained certified arborist Frank Ono, who served as the city forester for Pacific Grove for 17 years. “They have to look at what that tree represents. The best way to mitigate risk is by removing the tree. But there's a lot of factors to consider, such as trees blocking out wind or the migratory birds that pass through a lot of these trees. …There's risk and then there's how you mitigate risk. And just living near trees you accept a certain amount of risk.”
That may be, but Calvert and Monson are far past their threshold.
“This is something the city forced us to do,” Calvert said. “They forced us to get these ratings, and now they are forcing us to keep the tree standing. It's like (the city) forcing you to buy a Pitbull. Then, if it's dangerous, forcing you to keep it. It's crazy. It's our tree on our property.”
Calvert and Monson are two of several community members who have come up short in tree permit aspirations with the city. Since January alone, Pacific Grove has received 48 tree permit applications, according to Gho. He could not say how many have been approved or denied.
Part-time Pacific Grove resident Susan Elya said a certified arborist found a tree on her property to be high-risk last spring. Three months after applying for a tree permit, her application was denied. Elsewhere, longtime resident Ed Whitaker has been trying to have a tree near his house removed for years. He's been denied three times.
Calvert and Monson aren't going down without a fight. The couple is scheduled to appeal their permit denial later this month, in front of the city's Beautification and Natural Resources Commission on March 21. Whitaker will also be in attendance, to appeal his own denial. Both parties have hired an attorney.