Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Tree Canopy topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
City council hears canopy study, staff says acres-by-district data available for ordinance update
Summary
Council members pressed staff on a reported 2% canopy gain and asked for district-level acres to target areas experiencing redevelopment; staff said the acreage tables already exist and the city should focus on canopy quality and private-land outreach.
Council members asked staff for more granular tree-canopy data and signaled interest in updating the city's tree ordinance to respond to redevelopment pressures.
At the start of the meeting, a council member asked staff to "track . . . the amount of acres that are associated with each of these" canopy categories so the council could "know what to focus on for the areas that are gonna be experiencing the pressure of redevelopment." Staff replied the acreage tables "already have that" and can provide the data in a different spreadsheet format.
A council member who said this was their first canopy presentation asked why the city's canopy percentage had increased by 2% when it appeared trees were being removed across the city. Staff pointed to major redevelopment projects that had been replanted since 2017 and noted the 2025 study did not include certain Sandy Springs sites that had been under redevelopment earlier.
An urban-forest speaker explained why the canopy can increase despite some local removals: smaller edge trees removed during development are often replaced by faster-growing trees behind them, and larger, established trees can create conditions for regeneration. "95% of that urban canopy is on private land," the speaker said, arguing that the city needs policies that address private-land stewardship as well as public-tree management and that the focus should be on canopy quality and ecological resilience, not only percentage coverage.
Council members asked staff to provide district-by-district acreage breakdowns and to consider alternate metrics, such as relative canopy coverage that would exclude large forested parks that are unlikely to be developed. Staff confirmed they can provide the requested breakdowns and additional analysis.
Next steps: staff will share the acreage tables by district and follow up on an anomalous 60% change noted in one district to clarify the underlying causes in the dataset.
