Photo: Tony Giberson, PNJ.com
“Pensacola has won the battle to preserve a ‘heritage’ oak tree on Spring Street in North Hill.
The city and property owners Larry and Ellen Vickery signed an agreement that guarantees the 61-inch diameter tree will not be cut down in exchange for the city paying the Vickerys’ legal fees in the case.
Since 2019, the city and the Vickerys have been in a legal battle over the tree after the Vickerys sought to cut it down to build a new home on the vacant property.
The Vickerys complied with a new state law that allowed them to get an arborist’s opinion that a tree was unhealthy or posed a risk to people or property and could be removed without having to pay the city’s mitigation cost for cutting down a protected tree.
A 61-inch tree on Spring Street in North Hill has been the center of a legal battle between a property owner who wanted to cut it down to build a new home and the city, which sought to preserve it. The city won an initial legal challenge of the tree’s removal but lost two subsequent appeals, with the final ruling agreeing that the Vickerys had followed a state law as written and could remove the tree…
A city arborist inspection of the tree conducted in September found the tree to be in ‘good health,’ and while there were several dead branches in the crown, it posed a low risk to people or property…
The state law surrounding the case was changed this year to require the same standards for arborists to be used to determine the health of trees. The updated law strengthens the city’s position in enforcing its local tree ordinance, but the courts said the new law couldn’t be applied to retroactively to Vickerys’ case.”
— Jim Little, Pensacola News Journal