Next Ad-Hoc Tree Code Committee Meeting

2015 Tree Code Review Project update

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The second meeting of the Ad Hoc Tree Committee is scheduled for Monday, August 17. Details of the meeting are provided, below, and a map to the Holy Names Heritage Center is attached. 

2ND MEETING OF THE AD HOC TREE COMMITTEE

Monday, August 17, 2015, from 6-9 p.m.

Holy Names Heritage Center (Marylhurst Campus)
17425 Holy Names Drive
Lake Oswego, OR 97034

The meeting is open to the public and time is allotted for public comment. The agenda and other meeting materials are available at the link below:

Ad Hoc Tree Committee Meeting Information


The project coordinator is Jessica Numanoglu, Senior Planner. She can be reached by email at jnumanoglu@lakeoswego.city or by phone at 503-635-0283.

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USC Note:  Send comments to Jessica at the email above by this Friday, August 15, and/or come to the meeting and speak to the committee yourself.  All opinions welcome!  

My own comment would be to consider tree codes as they relate to your property.  Too often as citizens we are asked what we would like to see for our community and then have these desires codified into regulations that bind on us all.  

Tree codes should not be a wish list for what we want others to do with their property (their trees), or even what we are willing to do with ours, but by what right should the government have to tell citizens what they can and cannot do.  What are (or should be) the limits of government power, and what is reasonable control over our individual rights and freedoms?

I have heard many times that we need tree codes to prevent or tightly control tree removal - even of trees people planted themselves on their own property, dead and diseased trees, windfalls, stumps, and landscape mistakes or changes.  "If you don't have strict codes, people will cut down all the trees on their property."   Really?  Without requiring residents to plant trees, the city's tree canopy has grown even with about a thousand tree removals per year.   That doesn't sound like a populace that hates their trees.  The fear of what other people might do should not dictate what reasonable people can do without government oversight.  

Sure, some mistakes might be made.  But like any society where free men are allowed to exercise the maximum control over their lives and proprty, we have to allow for imperfection.  Certainly it is preferable to the system we have now whit government looking over our shoulder, peering into our back yards, and the populace in revolt, cutting trees before they reach the size where the government siezes control, or not wanting to plant trees at all.