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For half a century, Mountain View has had an ordinance on the books protecting some of the city’s oldest living resources – its heritage trees.
Now some community members are questioning whether the ordinance is living up to its purpose, after collecting data suggesting that the city has been approving the vast majority of residents’ requests to cut down heritage trees.
We have to be surgical in terms of our decisions and whether we’re allowing for removal or not.
Russell Hansen, City Of Mountain View Urban Forest Manager
“We have an ordinance that is supposed to protect heritage trees, but it doesn’t seem to be working,” said Rashmi Sahai, a Mountain View resident and member of GreenSpacesMV, a local environmental advocacy group.
Mountain View’s heritage tree ordinance was born out of the city’s desire to preserve its mature trees, particularly redwoods, oaks and cedars that have a trunk circumference of 12 inches or more. It also covers other large trees with trunks of 48 inches or more.
The ordinance allows for the removal of a heritage tree if a property owner or developer gets a permit for it. The trees that are removed are usually taken out because of poor health, but there are other reasons too, according to Russell Hansen, the city’s urban forest manager.
“For the most part, it’s those dead, dying, hazardous trees,” Hansen said. “It’s those trees that are ultimately being impacted by construction or those that just don’t fit in their location.”
For every heritage tree that is removed, the city requires the planting of new trees or the payment of a $1,785 in-lieu fee per tree if the new plantings don’t fit on the property. However, it is preferable to keep mature trees in place whenever possible, Hansen said.
Heritage trees are more efficient at carbon sequestration, are better at capturing water and provide more shade than newly planted trees. But it can take 20 to 30 years for them to grow to maturity.
“We have to be surgical in terms of our decisions and whether we’re allowing for removal or not,” Hansen said.
What does the data show about heritage tree removals?
In Mountain View, the heritage tree removal process has two separate tracks. Permit requests either go through the urban forestry division, which mostly focuses on small residential properties, or the planning division, which oversees big development projects.
The larger developments often get attention from community members when dozens and sometimes hundreds of heritage trees are chopped down at a time. But the removal of trees at individual homes adds up too, according to environmental advocates.
From 2013 to 2024, the urban forestry division approved roughly 94% of requests to cut down heritage trees, according to data GreenSpacesMV compiled. The approval rate appears to have declined recently, with about 85% of tree removal requests approved last year, the group calculated.
To get these figures, GreenSpacesMV downloaded heritage tree removal applications posted on the city’s website and used artificial intelligence to compile the information into a spreadsheet, where calculations could be made. The Voice used multiple techniques to assess the reliability of the data, and found it to be largely accurate. More information about the data is available at the end of this article.
The city of Mountain View did not dispute GreenSpacesMV’s findings, although spokesperson Lenka Wright said that the numbers lacked context and didn’t reflect the full picture of the city’s overall tree management practices.
The city also stressed that GreenSpacesMV’s figures include trees that are dead, dying or damaged beyond repair. However, even after removing cases where records show that the city deemed a tree was dead or dying, the Voice still calculated an 80% approval rate in 2024.
At the same time, just because a tree isn’t formally considered dead, that doesn’t mean it’s healthy, according to the city. Wright noted that trees have a natural life span and that property owners often submit a removal request after trying other options to preserve the tree.
“Many requests involve trees where retention is not possible,” Wright said. “Our focus is on keeping the community forest healthy, safe and resilient.”
The city also highlighted that only a small portion of the heritage trees in the city are removed each year. Mountain View has more than 85,000 trees, including about 56,000 heritage trees, Wright said. Fewer than 300 heritage trees are approved for removal annually, according to GreenSpacesMV’s data, or roughly 0.5% of the city’s overall number.
What is the status of Mountain View’s “urban tree canopy”?
In 2015, Mountain View adopted a community tree master plan to enhance and grow its “urban tree canopy,” which refers to the leaves, branches and stems of trees that shade the ground below. The city had conducted an aerial assessment in 2013 and found that 17.7% of Mountain View’s surface area was covered by tree canopy at the time. In comparison, Palo Alto had an urban tree canopy of 37.6% in 2010, according to the city’s urban forest master plan.
Mountain View’s goal was to boost its tree canopy to 22.7% by planting roughly 11,000 new trees over the next 15 years. According to Wright, the city’s tree canopy has increased roughly 1.8 percentage points in the past decade, bringing it to 19.5% overall. The city also plans to release a long-awaited biodiversity and urban forest plan next week, which will include recommendations for how to continue growing the city’s tree canopy, Wright said.
To help with tree plantings and educational outreach, Mountain View has been partnering with Canopy, a Palo Alto-based nonprofit. Last year, Mountain View planted nearly 400 trees, including trees given to community members as part of its Earth and Arbor Day Celebration, and is on its way to planting 500 this year, said Brenda Sylvia, assistant community development director. She added that this does not include replacement trees planted when heritage trees are removed.
“I hope our community understands that we’re making really big efforts to put trees in the ground,” Sylvia said. “But we also have a challenge. We don’t own every single space of land in the city.”
The challenges of protecting the canopy by saving individual trees
Once the urban forestry division approves or denies a permit request, the property owner or a community member can appeal the decision to the Parks and Recreation Commission.
However, only a small share of heritage tree permit decisions are appealed. This year, 13 appeals have gone before the commission, which is more than in previous years. All but one of the appeals this year have been from residents appealing the denial of a tree removal permit, according to city records.
In 2024, there were three appeals while none were submitted in 2023. Hansen, the city’s urban forest manager, was hired at the end of 2023. He attributed the increase in appeals to property owners largely getting their way before he arrived.
“We weren’t being as aggressive in what we were requiring of property owners and so by default, there were more approvals,” he said.
Since then, urban forestry has been more selective about granting tree removal permits, Hansen said. According to GreenSpacesMV’s calculations, the approval rate was 85% in 2024, lower than the 94% average since 2013. That includes all trees, both living and dead.
Community members also have a voice in the appeal process. Oftentimes, they show up at hearings to urge the commissioners to protect more trees. But the strategy has its limitations, as it tends to pit neighbors against each other and only addresses one or two trees at a time, according to advocates.
“It’s good to see that people care about their trees in their neighborhoods and put in a lot of effort to try and save them,” said Sahai, of GreenSpacesMV. “But it seems like a fruitless effort to work so hard on individual trees when they are being clearcut elsewhere.”
Not seeing the canopy through the felled trees
Arguably, it is larger development projects that have the biggest and most immediate impact on Mountain View’s tree canopy. These projects often involve the removal of not just one or two trees but dozens and sometimes hundreds at a time, including heritage trees.
At some point you have to say, ‘Enough is enough. We’re not going to cut down heritage trees unless it’s a really important project.’ Otherwise what meaning does this ordinance have?
Albert Jeans, Mountain View resident
This has been the case for at least a decade, according to previous reporting by the Voice. Over a three year period, from 2015 to 2018, city data showed that there were about 1,270 tree removals as a result of development projects.
The main reason that developers take out so many trees is for construction. Amid a regional housing crisis, Mountain View is prioritizing a plan to build thousands of new homes in the coming years, with certain parts of the city, including East Whisman and North Bayshore, slated for major growth. In recent years, trees have been on the chopping block for multifamily and affordable housing, as well as for office and commercial buildings.
“A lot of these developments, they’re reducing the amount of open space on their property. They’re building closer to the lot line and vertically,” Hansen said. “It just is far more challenging to try and adjust or preserve those trees or adjust the plans for the development.”
Occasionally, trees are removed for transportation improvements like a widened bus lane on Shoreline Boulevard.
Determining exactly how many heritage trees have been approved for removal as part of larger projects is difficult. While the city has an online archive of all the applications submitted to urban forestry since 2013, this is not the case with the planning division, which only has posted development projects going back to 2023.
The planning division oversees these bigger developments and the City Council approves or denies them, largely based on land use considerations other than tree preservation. Typically, the tree loss is mitigated with a promise from the developer to plant new trees that are expected to result in a net gain in canopy once those trees reach maturity.
In some cases, however, the development does not come to fruition, like the Google Landings project in North Bayshore that the tech giant abandoned last year. Google had proposed to build an 800,000 square foot office development on a 41-acre site along Highway 101, which the City Council approved in 2020.
Nearly 850 trees, including 316 heritage trees, were axed to make room for the project, leaving an empty construction site in its place. Since then, Google has agreed to plant 759 new trees, both on the site and throughout the city, and pay the city between $533,500 and $703,000 in mitigation fees. Google has also already planted roughly 1,344 replacement trees in other parts of Mountain View.
The scale of tree removals has not gone unnoticed by community members who have repeatedly urged the City Council to protect heritage trees more proactively.
“Of course, we want these big projects to go through for economic development. But at the end of the day, if we prioritize economic development over the environment, the environment is going to suffer,” said Mountain View resident Albert Jeans at a June council meeting.
“At some point you have to say, ‘Enough is enough. We’re not going to cut down heritage trees unless it’s a really important project.’ Otherwise what meaning does this ordinance have?” he asked.
How did the Voice validate the heritage tree data?
The Voice drew on many different sources for this article, including data collected by GreenSpacesMV that focused on heritage tree removals processed through the urban forestry division.
GreenSpacesMV downloaded over 2,500 applications submitted to the urban forestry division from 2013 to 2024. The applications are posted on the city’s website as PDFs, with the fields often filled out by residents in pen or pencil. GreenSpacesMV used an AI program to process the data and put it into a spreadsheet, from which calculations could be made.
The Voice spot checked the data by using a random number generator to select 100 applications, which Voice staff then manually reviewed and compared to the information compiled by the AI program.
The Voice conducted the process twice, after finding inconsistencies in the original data set. GreenSpacesMV worked to address the issues and regenerated the entire data set for the Voice to spot check a second time.
Overall, the AI program appeared to be largely accurate when tabulating the total number of heritage trees requested for removal and whether the requests were approved or denied. Out of the 100 applications the Voice checked the second time, there only was one case in which a removal request was incorrectly listed as denied when it actually had been approved by the city.
To further assess the data’s accuracy, the Voice hand tabulated all the permit applications submitted to urban forestry in 2024. There were several applications posted on the city’s site that didn’t include the decision. Omitting those, the Voice found that the city approved roughly 85% of requests last year, aligning with GreenSpacesMV’s findings. The Voice then removed all the applications where the city determined the tree was dead or dying, bringing the approval rate to 80% for all other trees.
The Voice did identify more permit decisions in 2024 than GreenSpacesMV’s analysis had included, but the overall approval rate was the same.
City staff did not dispute the figures presented by the Voice, including calculations from GreenSpacesMV that shows the city approved roughly 94% of requests to remove heritage trees from 2013 to 2024.
Mountain View doesn’t seem to care about heritage trees.
Mountain View allowed a neighbor of mine to build an ADU under the drip line of my heritage tree.
This can damage the root system of this 60 year old tree.
The city inspectors need to watch out for problems like this before they allow permits.
Excellent article. Thank you for highlighting this issue.
Google just planted some 24″ box trees on Landings Dr., but how long will it take those trees to reach the 60 foot height and breadth of the trees that were cut down? The trees planted in front of 100 Moffett on Moffett Blvd. have barely grown since they were planted 8 years ago.
And yet, we have 10% more tree cover than 10 years ago. There may be room for improvement, but things aren’t so bad overall.
The city does not have a watering requirement, which it should.
Neither redwoods nor sequoias are native to MV. It is like adopting a tiger from the wilderness to your home. Don’t get me wrong, I like to visit them on the home turf, but MV is not it and their shade can be frustrating. By the way, solar systems are more than 20 times more effective at displacing CO2 than a tree is at absorbing CO2. So, let’s stay with the species native to our microclimate and cordial with neighbors.
ML is correct. We have a lot of redwoods that don’t belong here. They’re all going to die sooner rather than later. We had to cut down ours in our front yard.
On top of that, my guess is we have more trees here now than when the Oholone lived here. You just have to look at still preserved open space such as Astrazero preserve and you can see how spread out the canopy is.
The city has 11 acres…but wants to pave it over for pickleball courts and has never planted a tree in the annex. That will tell you alll you need to know about priorities.
one thing the article doesn’t mention is that property owners can be denied insurance coverage if the tree coverage is too close to the structure, so while the really old trees aren’t affected by this, a lot of landscape trees from the 50s and 60s have grown to the point where they can’t be safely trimmed and meet clearance requirements. Obviously that’s not like Google’s clear cut but it does mean some mature trees are incompatible with retaining your home owners’ insurance.
Well, that is mighty weird… The Voice allows two people to have the same username? The post above is not from me!
The killing off of trees is one thing, it’s the lack of replacement that is the most damaging. With a city council beholden to developers that are busy building post-modern brutalist holding pen style buildings, Mountain View is starting to look like that part of Milpitas where the Great Mall is. And that stinks
In order to build the Landsby development, about 73 heritage trees were removed out of at least 100 trees. I went to City Council meetings about this at the time. Many of the trees were redwood trees. Whether they are native or not, they were thriving. Some of them were very large. This was in my neighborhood. Landsby was built in the former location of Safeway. Safeway was necessary to the community, including where I live on San Antonio Circle. There are many seniors and disabled people living here who would’ve appreciated Safeway much more than the Landsby development. The Landsby development does not serve the community. The proposed retail will not serve the community, either.Now the Safeway is a mile away and some of these people have difficulty walking there. When trees are replaced they are basically replaced with very young trees. Not fully grown trees. They take many years to grow, as you know. 80% is a huge number of trees. If these are indeed heritage trees and not just dead trees, even 50% is still a huge number. I have been to City Council meetings with developers present. The City Council often agrees to let developers go ahead with their plans even if the council members have personal reservations. The developers should design their projects around the trees to protect the trees that are there. I honestly don’t know why they don’t have their architects work to solve this problem. In my view, it is simply greed that doesn’t motivate developers to make changes to their plans.