Eleven Tools, Not One Used - a Tree Preservation Policy that Doesn't Preserve Trees

How developer bias captured Shorewood City Hall — and what it costs the people who live here.

Part Three of five in Anatomy of a Captured City. What capture is is the short version; this is the evidence from the tree file. It runs long on purpose.

The property is the Watten Ponds 2nd Addition and the parcels north of it — a large piece of old-growth Big Woods, one of the last in Shorewood. Not a fancy way of saying mature trees: the hardwood forest that covered this part of Minnesota before it was cleared, of which a tiny fraction survives anywhere in the state. You cannot plant it. We've written about why this ground is worth the trouble here.

Wayzata had a remnant of the same forest, headed for development. Wayzata bought it and protected it permanently. Two weeks ago that preserve joined the national Old-Growth Forest Network as Minnesota's ninth old-growth forest. That's vision.

If there is any property in Shorewood where the City should slow down, use every tool it has, and take seriously what the people who live here think, it is this one. Rare, irreplaceable, and the subject of more public attention than any project in years.

If not here, then where?

Eleven tools. Not one question.

Shorewood's Tree Preservation Policy is weaker than those of comparable cities. It's being rewritten right now and it needs to be — this development would go very differently in a city with a serious ordinance.

But even this Policy hands the City real tools. We counted eleven. So we reviewed the file with one simple question: which of the eleven did the City use?

Here is the whole toolbox, in plain English. For each one, we looked for any record that the City so much as considered it.

Prohibit cutting all or part of a stand of trees. No record.

Designate a tree or a grove as especially valuable, which triggers protection. No record.

Make the developer pay for an independent forester to review his own plan. No record.

Require a protection zone wider than the dripline, where the feeder roots actually are. No record.

Require trees be saved in groups rather than as scattered individuals. No record.

Restrict clearing in oak stands during oak wilt season, and make the developer pay if the disease spreads. No record.

Specify protective fencing — where it goes, how far out, and that it's up before work starts. No record.

Require root protection where equipment will encroach on critical roots. No record.

Set the financial guarantee for replacement trees, as a line item in the development contract. No record.

Require a separate guarantee for protecting the trees that are supposed to survive. No record.

Require a payment into the tree replacement fund. No record.

Eleven for eleven.

And that's a far lower bar than it sounds. We weren't asking the City to prove it made the right call. We were looking for any sign that somebody weighed the question at all — an email, a note, a line in a memo saying we thought about requiring this and decided against it. There's no decision to disagree with, because there's no record the question was ever asked.

We asked for everything: the project file, the correspondence, the staff notes, the consultant reports. The City produced a substantial volume of records. These decisions simply aren't in them.

And the City Council — the people you elect — was never told any of it.

That is what a captured department looks like from the outside. Not a scandal. A blank page where the hard questions weren't asked.

Not Watten Ponds — the same developer’s project at Cardinal Hill. No fencing, no protection zone, machines working in the roots: the trees still standing here will be counted as saved, and most of them will be dead within a decade.  And the silt fence is supposed to be buried, not laid on top of the ground, to stop erosion. This is what we call checking the box.

The catch-22 — why discretion means no policy at all

Here's the part that makes the blank page possible.

Under the Policy, a specimen tree is a tree the Zoning Administrator has decided is especially valuable. A stand is a grouping of trees the Zoning Administrator has decided is especially valuable. The developer's plan has to identify the specimen trees and stands on the property. Put those sentences together: a tree or a grove counts only if someone at City Hall says it counts.

So a plan showing no specimen trees and no stands is technically not an incorrect plan, no matter how many important trees are slated for destruction. No designation, nothing to protect.

This project will destroy 98 mature trees on the first two lots alone, and many more smaller ones. Not one of them has been designated anything. There is no evidence anyone from City staff ever looked at the property.

One clear winner. A lot of clear losers.

What comes down is a mixed canopy of mostly oak, hickory and sugar maple — the Big Woods community itself, not a lawn with some trees on it. Several of the oaks measure more than two feet through at chest height; the largest we've found is over two and a half feet. By any ordinary meaning of the word that is a stand, and the Policy gives the City the power to prohibit removal of all or part of a stand. Nobody at the City has even asked whether there is one.

They are red oaks, the group that dies fastest from oak wilt and spreads it through grafted roots to oaks on neighboring property. That is why the Policy restricts clearing in oak stands between May and July, requires same-day treatment of every wound, and makes the developer pay if the disease starts. None of it appears in the file.

One of those oaks is roughly 130 years old, with a canopy you can see from across central Shorewood. We've written about him here — we call him Arthur. The City calls him tree 11036, which in the file makes him exactly as significant as tree 10960, an ash that came up in the 1990s.

And it isn't only the trees inside the property lines. A 94-foot white pine, about 125 years old, with a Master Arborist's report already written making the case for its historic value, stands in the middle of the Clara Avenue easement — a street that exists on paper and has never been built. The City has said the developer may use that easement for access and utilities. It has said it hopes he won't. It has given no indication it would stop him, and no one has said that using the easement would trigger review of any kind.

Hope is not a tree protection measure.

Next: the same pattern in the City's own legal brief. Or skip to how it happens, and what to do about it.

Anatomy of a Captured City

How developer bias captured Shorewood City Hall.

1. Public watchdog or developer lapdog? Capture and Why You Pay — The name for what happens when a regulator starts seeing things the way the people it regulates do.

2. The Amazing Shrinking Environmental Review — An environmental review ordered in February covered one lot by September. Nobody voted. A chronology from the City's own records.

3. Eleven Tools, Not One Used - a Tree Preservation Policy that Doesn't Preserve Trees — The City's tree policy gave it eleven powers over how these woods come down. There is no record it used one of them.

4. One and a Half Percent, a Story of a Flood Foretold — The stormwater report left only a 1.5% margin on the largest storm, uphill of homes that have already flooded, without the City's file showing that the assumptions were checked.

5. Letting the Clock Run Out — The City is defending its own decision on appeal. Read what its brief leaves out.

6. How It Happens, and What to Do About It — Why this happens to normal people, and the two small things we're asking the City Council to do.

Also: A Eulogy for Arthur — a 130-year-old oak on this property. The City calls him tree 11036.

And: If Somebody Tells You Agency Capture Isn't a Real Thing — where the idea comes from, in five sources.

Related posts

Read this with the related posts:

Series overview · What Capture Is, and Why You Pay · The Amazing Shrinking Environmental Review · One and a Half Percent, a Story of a Flood Foretold · Letting the Clock Run Out · How It Happens, and What to Do About It · A Eulogy for Arthur · If Somebody Tells You Agency Capture Isn't a Real Thing