Who owns the trees?

The Whitefish City Council has approved a 4,300-word landscaping ordinance imposing detailed requirements on commercial and multi-family construction. Builders must submit a landscaping plan created by a licensed landscape professional identifying the size, species and locations of existing and proposed trees.

Landscaping plans must incorporate existing rocks and stumps and make every effort to protect qualifying trees, including any mature tree which the zoning administrator deems significant. It overrides otherwise permissible commercial and multi-family construction when a tree is in the way.

Ironically, the landscaping ordinance exempts single-family dwellings. Rather than encouraging multi-family housing, its stump-incorporation and tree-retention requirements predictably will delay and increase its cost for the sake of enhancing “the aesthetic quality” of the community.

This ordinance creates a major disincentive to construction of workforce housing, allowing it only on what is left of the few available locations after leaving stumps, rocks and qualifying trees in place. It is an aesthetic measure dressed up in public health and safety language. It may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back of affordable housing in Whitefish.

It is also wrongheaded. Trees, rocks and stumps on private land are not community resources that the City may commandeer for its landscaping preferences. They are private property.

Jim Ramlow, Whitefish