- February 5, 2025
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With a suggestion on the table to increase the city's tree preservation requirement by five to ten percent, the Port Orange Environmental Advisory Board decided to go along with city staff's recommendation to maintain the Volusia County minimum 15% tree preservation requirement for all development.
“I think overall it’s working well so far in the city," Advisory Board Member Newton White said. "Most of the time, I see it as being exceeded, what I’ve seen, because we get to keep so much of the area in conservation, and in a lot of the major growth areas it works out.”
“If you go into like Cypress Head, where there’s large areas of conservation, there’s a habitat for animals that can still stay there and have a place and not necessarily be in your trash can."
Newton White, Port Orange Environmental Advisory Board member
Current city code on the matter also requires that a minimum of the required trees — one per 2,500 square feet, which the board also recommended stay the same — be located within that 15% tree preservation area, as well as a minimum of 65% of any landscape buffer over 10 feet in width be set aside for preservation. This was one of the 13 suggestions discussed during the board's meeting on Monday, July 23, where members discussed changes to Port Orange's tree ordinance, which hasn't been majorly updated since the mid 1990s, said Margaret Tomlinson, Port Orange construction and engineering manager.
White added that in new subdivisions specifically, some smaller lots may not have trees, but there is an area where large clusters have been kept. He said older communities, like that of The Trails in Ormond Beach which was built around trees, have no habitat for animals.
“If you go into like Cypress Head, where there’s large areas of conservation, there’s a habitat for animals that can still stay there and have a place and not necessarily be in your trash can," White said.
Tomlinson said the most successful tree preservation areas are large areas and that, for example, isolated trees in wells in the middle of parking lots "die slow deaths."
Another one of the board's recommendations is to strengthen protections for all six-inch caliper trees and greater by requiring them to be mitigated. All specimen trees removed from a development will also necessitate mitigation, which Tomlinson said might be the biggest change in the tree ordinance.
“We think that’ll help incentivize just keeping this with existing trees," Tomlinson said. "Once [developers] realize they’re going to have to mitigate, or pay into the tree bank, it might help keep the buffers intact.”
The city's tree bank is made up of mitigation funds from the loss of historic and specimen trees. The money is used to plant trees in city public property.
Port Orange City Manager Jake Johansson, who attended the meeting, said the suggested mitigation changes in the tree ordinance may not work to save individual trees but that they'll help increase the amount of trees in the city. His concern, however, was having a "gap in the tree force."
“It’s kind of like the baby boomers," Johansson said. "You save every one of them, they’re all going to retire and they’re all going to die at the same time.”
Board member Kristine Cunningham disagreed.
“When you take up a tree and you put a new one there, it just doesn’t have the same protection to the land around it than if you would have just left it there to keep its strength and its root system," Cunningham said. "I can’t really support that because if you left it there it would be deep in the ground and would serve the purpose of the conservation.”
Later in the meeting, Johansson asked what the board's goal was in updating the tree ordinance. Environmental Advisory Board Chairman John Macaluso said it was to protect trees.
Cunningham said they had to think about public perception as well. She said people don't want to see destruction, and as a board, they have to look at all feasible options for tree preservation. Cunninham briefly mentioned the Yorktown Extension, saying that she hates looking at what's happened but that she also has to have faith the city made the right choice.
“The goal is to get this ordinance complete as soon as possible,” Macaluso said.
Moving forward, the board's suggestions for the updated city tree ordinance will be discussed at a future city council workshop. An official ordinance would then be drafted.
