Tree Protection in Jacksonville

Tree protection in Jacksonville rests on three layers that were built over several decades. The first is a Tree Protection Amendment written into the Jacksonville City Charter. The second is a tree ordinance in the city's Ordinance Code. The third is money: developers who remove protected trees and do not replace them pay into tree mitigation trust funds that the city then spends on planting. According to Scenic Jacksonville, the charter amendment requires preservation of specimen trees and mitigation when protected trees are cut down or removed during development.

Because the City of Jacksonville and Duval County were consolidated, the rules reach from the Northside marshes to the Beaches and from Mandarin to the Westside. That is a large territory for one program. When Council member Joe Carlucci went looking in early 2025, the Jacksonville Daily Record reported, he found the city tree fund sitting on $23 million in unspent money, and a staffing rule that had left one arborist responsible for spending it across 850 square miles.

Day to day, the work belongs to the Urban Forestry section of the Department of Public Works, and decisions about the fund run through the Tree Commission, which meets downtown in the Ed Ball Building. The Urban Forestry program describes its job as maintaining the canopy, planting new trees, doing research and working with neighborhoods across Duval County.

The protections came from citizen petitions, not from City Hall. Scenic Jacksonville's own account credits attorney William D. Brinton, who led advocacy in Jacksonville for more than thirty years before his death in 2017, with a strategy of pushing legislation that forced action. Two amendments to the Jacksonville City Charter came out of it. The Billboard Charter Amendment banned new billboards and, by Scenic Jacksonville's count, led to the removal of more than 1,600 of them. The Tree Protection Amendment is the one that matters here.

Two older groups merged into Scenic Jacksonville: Citizens Against the Proliferation of Signs, and Citizens for Tree Preservation. Scenic Jacksonville states that Citizens for Tree Preservation led the fight for both a Tree Ordinance and a Tree Protection Amendment to the Jacksonville City Charter. In 2019 the group merged again, with City Beautiful Jax, which had grown out of the JaxPride organization formed in 1989.

A September 2019 report from Scenic America laid out how the money side developed. The amendment and ordinance required developers to mitigate tree loss either by replanting trees elsewhere or by paying into a mitigation fund. After serious concern was raised over how those funds were being handled, the city formed the Tree Commission to oversee replanting and to bring transparency and accountability to the money. Scenic America credited former Jacksonville council member John Crescimbeni with a major role in that negotiation.

City documents call the payment a contribution rather than a fee. The Jacksonville Daily Record described it in April 2025 as a formula built from the city charter, the related ordinance, the size of the removed tree and whether the tree is native. The amount could be as little as $85 per caliper inch or, in the case of a live oak, $188 per caliper inch. Caliper is trunk diameter, so the price of clearing a lot in Jacksonville climbs with every inch of old live oak on it.

Those payments built up faster than Jacksonville spent them. Former Urban Forestry Manager Richard Leon told Jacksonville Today in January 2020 that the tree fund had about $26 million in it. Five years later the Daily Record put the unspent balance at $23 million, with the city spending about $6 million a year, roughly what came in. Scenic Jacksonville's Trees and Landscapes page gives the combined figure as more than $21 million.

Ordinance 2025-0102, sponsored by Carlucci, passed April 8, 2025, on a 19-0 Council vote. It waived the contribution for affordable housing projects. It also cut the size of the replacement tree a developer must plant to avoid paying: instead of having to plant trees of 4 caliper inches, developers can now plant trees of 2 caliper inches. Carlucci pointed to a Habitat for Humanity project that paid several hundred thousand dollars in mitigation fees to build 17 single-family homes in Jacksonville.

The other half of the bill went to tree advocates. It ended a limitation established in 2018 that the fund could pay for the efforts of one arborist for the entire city. Money in the Tree Protection and Related Expenses Trust Funds can now cover salaries, benefits and equipment for city landscape architects, arborists and urban foresters who plan, inspect and maintain planting on public property. Members of the Tree Commission and Jacksonville garden clubs attended the vote in support.

The Tree Commission takes its legislative authority from Chapter 94 of the Ordinance Code. Its committee meets on the third Wednesday of each month from 9:30 to 11:00 a.m. in the Ed Ball Building, 10th floor, in Downtown Jacksonville, and its Urban Forestry Management Plan Implementation Subcommittee meets about two weeks before. The city lists an October 14, 2026 workshop on tree planting programs and a regular meeting on October 21, 2026.

As of October 9, 2026, the roster posted by the city lists Nina Sickler, Director of Public Works; Curtis Hart as chair; and Council member Raul Arias as the City Council liaison. Staff include Justin Gearhart, Urban Forestry Manager, and Jennifer Grable, City Arborist. Last verified: October 9, 2026, on the City of Jacksonville website.

Spending is not automatic. Leon explained in 2020 that using the Jacksonville tree fund requires legislation that appropriates specific dollars to a specific project. The commission's role is to study and recommend, and the Council appropriates. In November 2024 Mayor Donna Deegan described the city's first Urban Forestry Management Plan as a guide for the tree commission to distribute the tree fund for planting the right trees in the right places.

Most of it goes into the ground on public property in Jacksonville. The best known channel is the 630-CITY program. The Urban Forestry FAQ tells residents to contact 630-CITY to request up to two trees in the right of way in front of a home, typically the strip between the street and the back of the sidewalk. Foresters inspect each site for utilities, poles, driveways, hydrants and intersections before choosing a species. Leon said the program began as a $200,000 pilot; the Council then approved $1.6 million, which planted about 1,200 trees and still left 700 requests waiting in early 2020.

Larger jobs go through the Tree Commission's Level 2 and Level 3 Tree Planting Programs, the second carrying a grant agreement. Scenic America noted that homeowners associations can submit grant proposals and that only approved native trees may be planted. Riverside Avondale Preservation used the mitigation funds for its RAP ReLeaf Tree Canopy Enhancement Program in Riverside and Avondale, and the JaxDigsTrees coalition planted a tree at every school in the city. Scenic Jacksonville also lists work with Duval County Public Schools and the Sulzbacher Center.

The fund now pays for shade where people wait. On November 14, 2024, according to Jacksonville Today, the Jacksonville Transportation Authority and the city planted the first of 11 shade trees for bus stops, starting with a live oak on Commonwealth Avenue in Woodstock and another in front of the Westbrook library. The trees are being paid for out of the city's tree mitigation fund, the JTA said, as part of the Resilient Jacksonville strategy that began on October 13, 2023.

Trees on city property get the most direct protection. Urban Forestry states that healthy trees are protected under the tree ordinance and will not be removed because they could be causing cracking in a sidewalk or driveway; a separate division handles the sidewalk, and foresters may grind roots only as needed. Removals require a risk assessment by a forester. On city-maintained ditch banks the city leaves stumps and dead trunks in place because deadwood is an important habitat for many wildlife species, and the trees hold Jacksonville ditch banks against erosion.

Some corridors carry their own rules. In Mandarin, City Ordinance 2001-1009 designates parts of Mandarin Road as a scenic and historic corridor, and, as reported by Jacksonville Today in May 2025, treats any live oak with a diameter of 6 inches or more within 20 feet of the street right of way as a private protected tree whose removal is prohibited. When the JTA proposed a $4.5 million sidewalk along that road, Council member Michael Boylan said the urban forester or arborist had to be consulted before any permits.

The city's best known tree needs no ordinance to be famous. Urban Forestry's tree of the month page describes the Treaty Oak as a 250-year-old live oak with a trunk over 25 feet around, a height of 70 feet and a crown spreading over 145 feet. The same page shows the other end of the scale: dead sand live oaks in Kathryn Abbey Hanna Park, killed by salt water during Hurricane Matthew's storm surge and left standing for wildlife, and red bottlebrush, dropped from the 630-CITY list once it was added to the invasive tree list.