Shady Dealings: For the City of Miami, Tree Removal is a Lucrative Business

The City of Miami’s 20-year-old Tree Trust Fund has raised millions of dollars by charging property owners who want to cut down their trees. Where the money goes is not entirely clear.

Last year when City of Miami Building Department officials granted a developer’s request to remove 55 trees – including a number of mature oaks, royal poincianas, mahoganies and other hardwoods – to make way for the massive, five-story Elemi at Grove Village housing project on Thomas Avenue in Coconut Grove, it came with two conditions: plant 73 mostly smaller trees around the perimeter of the property and pay $120,000 into a city account earmarked for tree plantings elsewhere in the city.

Whether the payment – one of dozens from Coconut Grove alone over the past two years to the City of Miami Tree Trust Fund – will actually result in trees being planted remains uncertain.

While City of Miami officials have refused repeated requests for a detailed report of Tree Trust Fund expenditures, records obtained by the Spotlight suggest that only a small fraction of the money it raises is being used to plant trees – despite a clear requirement in the city code that funds be exhausted annually for that purpose. 

Over the past two years, according to the City of Miami’s annual filings with the Arbor Day Foundation’s Tree City USA accreditation program, the city planted 2,214 trees at a total cost of $478,161 for “planting and initial care.” 

But that figure represents only 8 percent of the $5,765,000 transferred from the fund to the city’s Office of Capital Improvements during that period to pay for its citywide tree planting program.

How, and if, the remaining $5.3 million has been spent is unclear.

The city’s tree planting program – what’s planted and where – is at the discretion of the Department of Resilience and Public Works. Typically, new plantings are in public parks and along roadways and other rights-of-way, but Miami is running out of places to plant them, explains Quatisha Oguntoyinbo-Rashad, the 25-year City Hall veteran who heads Miami’s Environmental Resources Division.

For instance, Oguntoyinbo-Rashad had initially proposed planting along both sides of Thomas Avenue to replace canopy lost to the Elemi at Grove Village project, but the existing rights-of-way could not support them. What happens now, if anything at all, is up to officials from Resilience and Public works, she says.

In September the City Commission approved another $2,306,000 transfer from the Tree Trust to Capital Improvements for the current fiscal year to fund tree plantings.

The fund is managed by the city’s Building Department, which oversees tree removal permitting. Among the changes to the city’s tree ordinance that city commissioners are expected to debate later this month is a provision that would transfer control of the fund to the city manager’s office. The proposal, sponsored by District 1 Commissioner Miguel Gabela, would also loosen restrictions on the fund’s approved uses.

Gabela’s office did not respond to a request for comment from the Spotlight. Both City Manager Art Noriega and District 2 Commissioner Damian Pardo, who represents Coconut Grove, declined to answer questions about the Tree Trust Fund.

The City of Miami’s Tree Trust Fund was established in 2004, initially to steer fines and penalties for tree violations directly into planting programs. But city officials soon discovered that many developers and property owners would gladly pay for the privilege of removing trees. Fees are typically levied when a development’s scale precludes relocating trees or planting new ones elsewhere on a property. Today only a tiny fraction of fund revenues is derived from fines for code violations. 

To assure that the fund is not siphoned for other uses – other capital projects, or maintaining required budget reserves, for instance – the ordinance authorizing the fund stipulates that it be spent in its entirety each year, with no less than 80 percent going directly to tree planting initiatives. The remaining funds must be spent on related services – landscape design, survey work, and training for code inspectors working with trees.

The fund quickly became an unexpected windfall, routinely bringing in around $1 million each year over the past decade, records show. 

But city officials have routinely failed to spend the funds to plant new trees. An audit conducted by the city’s Independent Auditor General’s Office in 2021 found that between 2015 and 2019 only 21 percent of the fund’s revenues were spent on tree plantings and maintenance – far below the required 80 percent. The audit also documented unauthorized expenditures and faulted city officials for lacking clear guidelines for Tree Trust Fund management and oversight.

“The lack of policies and procedures creates an environment in which there is an increased risk of fraud, waste, or abuse,” the auditors wrote.

Over the past two years tree removal has been increasingly lucrative for the city, documents obtained by the Spotlight reveal, with the Tree Trust Fund collecting 670 payments totaling nearly $3 million – around $1 million higher than previous budget projections.

While the bulk of those payments is linked to large development projects – $171,000 for downtown Miami’s 2000 Biscayne high-rise; and $64,000 for Brickell City Centre – many others are single-family home developers clearing a lot, or homeowners making way for a room addition: in North Grove, $4,000 on Trapp Avenue and $6,000 on Tequesta Lane; in West Grove, $1,250 on Frow Avenue; in South Grove, $11,000 on Battersea Road, just to name a few.

Unavoidably, those payments come at a cost. Between October 2022 and May 2024 city building department officials issued permits to developers and private landowners throughout Miami for the removal of 4,095 trees. The city also removed 439 trees of its own, records show.

In 2007 the City of Miami became a signatory to the U.S. Conference of Mayor’s Climate Protection Agreement which, among other goals, promotes urban canopy growth. Two years later the city adopted a Tree Master Plan which declared a target of roughly doubling its existing tree urban canopy citywide to 30 percent by 2020.

While the city no longer tracks such data, Miami-Dade’s 2021 assessment of overall tree canopy places Miami’s at about 18 percent, or barely above its baseline level of 15 years ago.  
But Coconut Grove, the city’s shadiest neighborhood with about a third of its area covered in trees, is among the biggest losers of tree canopy, registering a net loss of nine percent between 2016 and 2020. With the area experiencing a post-pandemic uptick in both commercial and single-family home construction, researchers expect an even higher rate of decline in the four years since.