Does Money Grows on Trees?

Last week Erica Barnett wrote a thought provoking article in Publicola looking at the proposed tree legislation. Among its criticisms, the article noted the cost of the new staff needed to administer this proposed legislation against the expected revenue the city hoped to raise to fund a tree planting in underserved neighborhoods.

… the city’s Department of Construction and Inspections says it will need to hire three new full-time staffers at an initial cost of $273,000 a year. That more than offsets the revenues the city expects to receive from payments in lieu of tree plantings, which will be used to plant new trees on city-owned property—an estimated $191,000 in the first year.

Analysis of the tree legislation didn’t include the exact cost of replacing trees removed for development. But using the city’s own average “nursery purchase price” of $2,833 per tree, that $191,000 would plant about 67 trees citywide

Barnett raises that the point that it's hard for government initiatives to be effective when more money is spent on administration than on actually achieving their goals. A few months ago AIA Seattle sent a letter to the council and the mayor critiquing the proposed legislation and outlining some principles that they felt were important in crafting a successful tree policy. One of those principles was very much along the same lines as Barnett's criticism:

Spend money on planting trees, not on paperwork:  Arborist reports, regulatory review, city inspections, and the attendant delays and bureaucracy associated with an emphasis on verification of compliance are costly. City and community resources are better allocated to developing the tree canopy.

If we take Barnett’s point, and expand the cost of the program to include not just the salaries of the new SDCI staff but the cost of all of the paperwork and bureaucracy required by the program, how much would that be? How much are we spending to generate $191,000 of fees for the city to plant 67 trees per year? I sat down this week to make a rough estimate.

I began with the city permit data from data.seattle.gov for issued building permits for 2022. My goal was to figure out about how many permits each year might trigger a tree review. The first step is to figure out how many permit processes a year are going to be affected by the new tree legislation. I began with all of the new construction permits. Safe to say a new building is going to have significant ground disturbance. I also looked through the additions and alterations, filtered by the keyword “addition”, and then manually checked the project descriptions to remove projects where the addition seemed likely to be at an upper story and not at the ground level. Most of the projects left over are additions to single family homes, attached accessory dwelling units, and projects like decks and porches that create ground disturbance.

Seattle permit data isn't exactly straightforward. Some permit applications generate more than one permit number. If there are multiple structures proposed on a site, SDCI will issue a separate permit for each freestanding structure. So, short of researching each individual line item, there's a little guesswork involved here. Most of the new multifamily projects are of the townhouse variety which typically generate 2-3 permits for each project, and many of the new single-family projects include a DADU which would generate two permits for each project (one for the house and one for the DADU). I created a summary table of each project type and divided the single family permits by 2 and the multifamily permits by 3. From that I got an estimate of about 1200 completed permit applications per year.

Some of those projects aren't going to have trees on site or on neighboring sites or anywhere near the area of ground disturbance and so they won't require a review. But the whole point of this legislation is to require careful study of all sites to make sure protected trees are identified and that exhaustive means are taken to protect them, so I think it's fair to assume that a significant percentage of projects are going to have to go through the new processes outlined by this legislation. For the purposes of this exercise, I assumed that 65% of sites that have ground disturbance will be subject to the SDCI arborists review during the permitting process. That works out to just under 800 unique permit application processes each year that will be subject to new reviews.

2022 - Complete permit applications with ground disturbance
	Permits	likely # of projects
Single Family/Duplex	847	424
Multifamily	242	81
Commercial	37	37
Additions	681	681
Est. projects with ground disturbance		1222
% of project sites requiring review		65%
Annual permits requiring review		794

The next step is to estimate how much these new permit reviews will cost. All projects with a tree nearby will now begin with a survey and an arborists report. Once those elements are provided the architect must translate those into a series of diagrams that analyze the trees, their protected root zones, any proposed disturbance into those root zones, placement of protection fencing etc. The city arborists will review the architects’ diagrams and the arborist report. SDCI has the discretion to request further site investigations to explore the extent of feeder roots so that those elements may be located with precision and protected if deemed necessary. Based upon those site investigations, the tree protection areas may have to be adjusted and the building redesigned.

With this background in mind, I have attempted to estimate the additional costs per project that we might expect in order to comply with these new requirements:

Estimated Costs of Proposed Tree Legislation per Application
Required Costs/Processes	Low	High
Survey	$3,000	$5,000
Arborist Report	$1,500	$2,500
Arborist Supplement	$500	$1,000
Arborist review letter	$300	$500
Architect site plan and diagrams	$3,000	$5,000
SDCI reviewer charges (5-10 hours)	$1,500	$3,000
Architect plan revisions (15-50 hours)	$1,500	$5,000
Time delay costs (1-2 Months)	$5,833	$11,667
Estimated total	$17,133	$33,667

This works out to an average of about $25,000 per project. That might seem like a big number but if anything it's probably a lowball estimate, because this is just looking at costs incurred during design and permitting. It doesn't take into account costs during construction required for tree protection fencing, SDCI inspection fees, and increased fees for right of way usage due to the inability to stockpile materials on site. But that's not exactly my world and those costs will vary a bit more depending on project specifics, so for now let's just go with $25,000 additional cost per project. With that in mind we can flesh out our earlier table to get a total annual cost of this new process: $20 million dollars! 

2022 - Complete permit applications with ground disturbance
	Permits	likely # of projects
Single Family/Duplex	847	424
Multifamily	242	81
Commercial	37	37
Additions	681	681
Est. projects with ground disturbance		1222
% of project sites requiring review		65%
Annual permits requiring review		794
Total Annual Process Cost		$20,177,971

So, if we put all of this information together, our new tree legislation will generate $20 million in new bureaucracy costs every year to plant 67 trees. That's $300,000 per tree. If you're looking for an example of ineffective and wasteful government policy, the $300,000 tree is right up there with the $10,000 toilet seat.

Imagine what else you could do with that money, aside from pushing a bunch of paper in a circle. $20,000,000 would fund the planting and maintenance of 7,000 trees on public land every year. Or, instead of paying city employees an hourly wage to plant and maintain trees, you could simply give away free trees and let an army of volunteer tree lovers do the rest.

Some pieces of problematic legislation are basically sound ideas that simply need to be tweaked. This proposal is not one of them. It's based on a flawed premise that the way to grow our tree canopy is to create a massive new bureaucracy to restrict and fine landowners into retaining the trees they have. But trees are something that people really like, are generally happy to maintain, and will often volunteer to plant all on their own. Where do you think all the trees that we have today came from? 

We are working to get this proposal amended to try to blunt the worst effects that might suppress housing by making sites undevelopable. But there's no tweak that can pave over the gulf between the millions of wasted dollars and the thousands of dollars in benefits. Here's hoping the council can find five votes to send this one back to the drawing board.