Highland Village staff outline plan to enforce commercial landscaping rules, cite limits from older approvals

City staff told the Highland Village City Council that they have begun a phased effort to assess and enforce commercial landscaping requirements across the city, but said the work is limited by staffing, historical approvals and legal constraints.

Scott Christen, a city staff member presenting at the council’s April work session, said the city has been compiling approved landscape plans and has engaged a licensed arborist to compare conditions on site with those plans. “We took that and we kind of ran with it a little bit and … we started to develop a plan,” Christen said, adding that the city had “one field code enforcement officer” responsible for many duties.

The city’s process, as described by Christen, starts with locating an approved landscape plan for each commercial development, supplying that plan to an arborist for a condition assessment, then having the code enforcement officer review the arborist’s report to determine whether a violation exists. If a violation is found, the city would open a code enforcement case and issue notice, Christen said. He described the expectation that, once a site is restored, future inspections could be largely cursory and that the city…