Tree Speech

Nobody in the ETJ wants the clearcutting bill, but that’s not stopping Senators Dan Patrick and Robert Nichols. Patrick & Nichols claim they are defending the "rights" of people living in the ETJ.

During the committee process, ranchers and landowners from San Antonio’s ETJ testified against the bill. Some of them own hundreds of acres of land there. But the number testifying for the bill? Exactly zero.

There are two reasons for this:

1. The developers pushing this bill don’t live in the ETJ or, in many cases, in Texas.
2. Homeowners are exempt from SA’s tree ordinance .

So why does Nichols continue to push the bill when people in the ETJ don’t want it? Because the real reason for the bill is to protect "developers profits", not "property rights". And it’s those developers who pay for the Senators’ campaigns.

Videos of Senate debates over the clearcutting bill are here starting at 2 hr, 24 min, 15 s (02:24:15) and here starting at 1 hr, 32 min, 15 s (01:32:15).

During this extreme drought we’re in, the farthest thing from most peoples’ minds is flooding. But San Antonio is “flash flood alley”, so it may be wise to think ahead to our next rainy period and beyond.

Recently, the Center for Watershed Protection suggested a method that cities can use to give developers stormwater credits for trees. In Runoff Ramblings: Trees as Stormwater BMPs CWP notes that:

A “stormwater credit” system reduces the stormwater management requirements a developer must meet in exchange for use of an “alternative” (i.e., not on the approved list of BMPs) practice that reduces the volume of runoff (and associated pollutants) generated at the site.
The incentive for using these practices is that they can result in cost savings to the developer by reducing the size of structural stormwater BMPs that must be constructed.

Central Park Wet Pond in Austin

This seems like a good way of encouraging tree preservation, and is something San Antonio should consider. A 2009 study showed that San Antonio’s urban forest provides $1.6 billion in stormwater management services.

It should be noted that San Antonio’s tree ordinance provides incentives for using trees in stormwater management facilities. Unfortunately, the “incentive” provided to the developer is a reduction in the number of trees he needs to preserve or plant.

I’m always amused by how developers morph into avid environmentalists whenever Ashe junipers are discussed. It seems they are suddenly interested in helping the aquifer.

They propose to do that by mowing down all the junipers, regardless of size, and paving over the land they once occupied. The thought that replacing trees with parking lots might actually harm the aquifer never even flits through their minds.

Although conventional wisdom dictates that cedars must die, a number of recent scientific studies call those beliefs into question or refute them entirely. For example, an American Geophysical Union press release, Texas surprise: When trees, shrubs replace grasses, water flows can increase, reports that:

…the takeover of rangelands by trees and shrubs can increase flows of streams and recharging of groundwater…

We’re also seeing large-scale increases in the amount of spring flows. This is opposite of what everybody is presuming —[which is that] the trees are there sucking up all of this water. The trees are actually allowing the water to infiltrate.

Referring to the Edwards Aquifer and semiarid and subhumid rangelands in general, they note:

…the transition to woody plants appears to be good news for regional water resources.

Texas Forest Service personnel examine state champion Ashe juniper

Research scientist Dr. Jim Heilman, a professor of environmental physics at Texas A&M University, thinks that bulldozing the trees to save water is a case of where…

…policy gets ahead of science.

His recent studies at the Freeman Ranch west of San Marcos also found that live oaks use more water than the junipers.

For more on this issue, read our Scientists refute cedar “water hog” myth and Ashe juniper and land development webpages.

A recent blog post titled The future looks weedy provides a rather grim outlook for trees in the warmer future.

…when things go topsy-turvy, fast-growing, short-living, mass-reproducing species gain the upper hand. Weeds win, in other words….Long-lived species, such as trees, may not be coaxed north by the heat, but rather muscled out by scrappier types.

Citing studies in the journal Ecology Letters, the author concludes that, instead of trees expanding their ranges northward, they may simply be crowded out of their existing ranges.

Trees that are numerous in the northern part of their range, such as American beech, red maple, and cork-bark oak, have the greatest potential to push north. But parts of the American Southeast will probably see some species, such as American beech, river birch, and shagbark hickory, disappear.

During their fight to defeat a stronger tree ordinance, developers duped the Express-News into publishing an op-ed piece entitled Does city know our tree canopy ranks No. 1?.  In it, they claim that San Antonio’s tree canopy…

…ranks first among the nation’s 50 largest cities.

The only problem is, San Antonio is most definitely not #1. In what could generously be characterized as poor research, the authors pulled numbers from various studies that were in no way comparable, and used them to reach a wildly incorrect conclusion.

For example, they claimed we have greater tree canopy cover than Atlanta. But if you compare tree canopy measurements made using comparable technologies, San Antonio has only 18% canopy vs. Atlanta’s 29%.

The University of Vermont’s Spatial Analysis Laboratory blogged on this topic in a recent post titled Did the Land Cover Change?  It seems the City of Roanoke, Virginia is claiming that its tree canopy increased from 32% to 48% in only 8 years! Here too, an incorrect conclusion was drawn. As the blogger points out:

The bottom line is that using land cover datasets derived from different sensors using different methodologies to report change yields misleading information.

While this may seem to be an innocent mistake on developers part, it should be pointed out that this very issue has been hashed out in numerous public meetings. Experts on the subject have explained it ad nauseum, repeatedly emphasizing that measurements made from a satellite 450 miles above the earth cannot be compared with measurements taken from an airplane flying close to the ground. Despite that, developers continue to mislead the public and our elected officials.