Atlanta City Council approves controversial changes to tree protection ordinance

The Atlanta City Council unanimously passed a controversial update to the city’s tree protection ordinance (TPO) at its June 16 meeting.

The vote came after the update was advanced by the Community Development and Human Services Committee on June 10.

After months of discussing and drafting changes to the TPO, the council approved a scaled-down version of the legislation, and the updated ordinance was sent the Mayor Andre Dickens’ desk for his signature.

The ordinance increases the recompense fee for removing trees from $130 to $140 per diameter inch of the tree trunk, doubles the fines for illegal tree removals, increases the City’s Tree Trust Fund to $400,000 to assist low-income seniors in managing hazardous trees on their properties, adds funding for arborists in the Department of City Planning and one senior arborist in the Department of Parks and Recreation, and adds discounts on recompense fees for developers of affordable housing to support Dickens’ goal of building or preserving 20,000 afford housing units by 2030.

“As a multi-generational Atlanta native, I am proud of our beautiful city in the forest. Atlanta has always been a national leader in tree canopy and we have taken measures to protect it for future generations,” Dickens said in a statement. “Thank you to our planning team, city council and everyone who worked together for a greener, more sustainable Atlanta. I look forward to the next steps of the tree preservation work that will align with our land use goals.”

These changes are the first major updates made to the TPO in over 25 years, but while Greg Levine, the Executive Director of Trees Atlanta, says the changes are a “step in the right direction,” he and other advocates believe the protections are ultimately not enough to meaningfully protect trees.

“The recompense fee is an improvement, but there are lots of discounts and opportunities to not pay the full [fee… and] that cap needs to be higher,” he said during public comment, referring to the recompense fee cap, which ranges from $12,500 to $35,000 per acre depending on the zoning. This is a significant increase from the previous cap of $5,000 per acre, but Levine told Rough Draft in April that he believed that the cap should’ve been completely removed.

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Council member Antonio Lewis said at Monday’s meeting that he understood the concerns of the tree advocates but felt that the legislation still needed to move forward.

“[The ordinance] didn’t go far enough for me, but what I’ve learned as a councilperson is that you can’t kill [legislation] because you didn’t get everything you wanted,” he said.

According to Council member Michael Julian Bond, who sponsored the ordinance, the changes are being pushed forward despite concerns that they aren’t expansive enough so that the TPO updates can become effective by the time the zoning rewrite, known as ATL Zoning 2.0, is made effective in January 2026.

The improvements to the TPO, despite being less expansive than advocated for by tree preservation activists, align with the city council’s goal of increasing the city’s tree canopy coverage to 50 percent. Atlanta’s canopy has dwindled from 48 percent in 2008 to 46.5 percent in 2018, with further decline expected in the seven years since.   

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