Plandome residents will have to wait until at least fall for a halt on tree removal to be lifted.
After a public hearing, Plandome trustees approved extending for three months a moratorium on tree removal until Oct. 18. Until lifted, village residents are not allowed to remove more than two trees of 10 inches in diameter or greater from their property.
Trustee Andrew Bartels said the village is working on a new draft of the statute to cover tree removal after the expiration of the moratorium and is hoping to finish the draft in July. The board, however, expects to hold off on a hearing on any proposed changes until after summer so all interested residents can attend.
“Right now, it’s a draft. It’s taken into account a lot of the comments we’ve heard,” village Trustee Ray Herbert said. “We’re trying to balance something that works and something that’s fair. The reason we’re asking for the extended moratorium is it was a major rewrite. We’re telling you about the draft we have that is still subject to substantial comment.”
Bartels said trustees have taken many of the comments from previous public hearings into account in the new draft and are considering a dual-path approach in the future.
“If a homeowner wants to make changes to trees around the house without changing the footprint of the house, we’d have a streamlined process that’s more straightforward,” Bartels said. “If there were substantial change, then that would be brought before the design review board. That’s the basic idea we’re working with in the new draft.”
Bartels estimated “90 percent of requests” would likely fall into the streamlined path, while some would still require a design review board meeting and additional approvals.
Village resident Tom D’Ambrosio voiced his concern about historic trees being protected by the statute, though trustees insisted any language involving protections based on age had been removed from the working draft.
“One of the things I’d encourage the board to think about is not necessarily everyone wants to live in the shadow of a giant. I’m not so sure they should have to, especially if the tree is closer to the house,” D’Ambrosio said during the hearing.
D’Ambrosio also doesn’t want people with smaller homes on a lot with room to grow to be discouraged from expanding a home within existing village codes because of existing trees surrounding the building. Mayor M. Lloyd Williams said the goal is not to restrict homeowners from expanding but to keep residents from building out to the maximum capacity of the lot and removing all surrounding foliage.
Katie Saville, the only trustee not present for the original vote to enact the moratorium last fall, is familiar with the damage trees can do after an incident last summer when a tree from a neighboring property crashed into her backyard.
“Luckily, my kindergartener was in a small area that wasn’t flattened and the other one got far enough out of the way that something horrible didn’t happen,” Saville said. “It was a huge tree on a neighbor’s property, it was struck by lightning and it wasn’t removed. And it landed on my children. There was nothing I could do about that tree.”
Since the moratorium began last October, trustees have granted one exemption for resident Penni Sodi to remove five trees from her property.
