In a place that prides itself on its soaring pines, venerable live oaks and wide variety of other trees, perhaps it’s no surprise that the city of Jacksonville charges developers who remove trees from construction sites and don’t replace them.
The fee, known as a “contribution” in city documents, is based on a multifaceted formula that involves the city charter, a related ordinance, the size of a removed tree and whether it is considered native, among other elements. The amount could be as little as $85 per caliper inch or, in the case of a live oak, $188 per caliper inch.
As City Council member Joe Carlucci discovered after becoming involved in tree-planting projects in his district, the amount of fee payments that have flowed into a trust fund for the city’s tree mitigation efforts were more than the city has been able to spend on replacing trees.
And not just a little more — $23 million more.
“So I started asking questions. Why is this money sitting here?” Carlucci said.
“And the answer was kind of a labyrinth that involved a bunch of different locks that had to be unlocked with different keys.”
Carlucci’s unraveling of the issue involved sorting through the city charter and a longstanding ordinance on tree mitigation, creating middle ground between cost-conscious developers and advocates of tree protections and finding the right people to answer his questions on sometimes-arcane policies that shaped the city’s tree-planting efforts.
The result was successful legislation that reduced the fee, expanded what the fund could be used for and drew support from both developers and advocates.
Ordinance 2025-0102, which passed April 8 on a 19-0 Council vote, reset the fee to an amount specified in the city charter, $85 per caliper inch, and established a new requirement for the size of replacement trees.
Instead of having to plant trees of 4 caliper inches to avoid paying the fee, he said, developers can now plant trees of 2 caliper inches. Another provision offered relief for developers of affordable housing.
Meanwhile, in a provision that drew support from advocates of tree mitigation and protection, the ordinance did away with a limitation established in 2018 that the fund could be spent on the efforts of one arborist for the entire city.
Now, money paid into the city’s Tree Protection and Related Expenses Trust Funds can be used to provide for salaries, benefits and equipment for city landscape architects, arborists and urban foresters for planning design, implementation, inspection and maintenance of tree planting projects on public property.
Finally, the ordinance provides built-in protection through a clause that triggers an automatic increase in fee calculations if the total of unallocated funds in the trusts falls below $5 million or after Sept. 30, 2030, whichever occurs first.
Carlucci said the legislation would help developers fill demand for affordable housing, as it will reduce building costs that are passed along to homebuyers.
He said developers have long complained that 4-inch trees are in high demand and short supply, raising their costs, while the smaller trees are much more plentiful and less expensive.
He cited a Habitat for Humanity project for which the nonprofit paid several hundred thousand dollars in tree mitigation fees to build 17 modestly sized single-family homes.
As for concerns that smaller trees take longer to grow, Carlucci said developers can plant more of them and that the smaller trees are prone to take root more easily.
On the other end of the equation, the city will have more options for spending the unallocated funds. Carlucci said the city has been spending about $6 million per year, which is roughly the annual amount coming in.
“That’s one employee for 850 square miles of Jacksonville to spend millions of dollars a year on trees,” he said.
“There’s just no way that was going to work. So now we’re going to bring in some reinforcements.”
The ordinance gives city administrators the option – with Council approval – to hire staff in different departments for tree planting efforts, studies and to cover related expenses.
On the night of the Council vote, members of the Tree Commission and garden clubs in Jacksonville were on hand to show support for the bill.
Carlucci initially set out to merely reduce the fee amount so that the account could be spent down while giving developers some relief, but worked with Council members on revisions that addressed the need for mitigation.
He said he spoke with arborists, urban foresters, landscape architects and others to find out why the city didn’t have more positions to implement the $20 million-plus fund, and the answer was, “That’s just the way the ordinance is.”
“But that’s not working,” Carlucci said, further describing the message he heard from tree mitigation advocates.
“And it’s not going to work for a city that’s growing and wants to build a healthy environment and resilient neighborhoods. So we need to hire more of these positions.”
Council member Chris Miller commended Carlucci after the vote.
“This would have been an easy one just to kind of jam through and keep one of the parties happy, but instead you took the time to sit down with people and find a good way forward that everybody could live with,” Miller said. “I just want to put a spotlight on that, to say that’s what we can do with contentious bills every time if we choose to.”