Town Erroneously Approved Development Plans, Now Says That The Ordinances Can't Be Enforced Because Of That Approval.

Location: NC (North Carolina, USA)

I feel like I'm in the worst hellish crossover of tree law and municipal nonsense. A developer started building directly behind my house. (Sucks, but part of town living) Our town has really elaborate and specific tree-protection ordinances that require trees of certain size/species to be protected even if they are off-site. Like down to the measurements of the trunk and the species, definition of the measurements on how far out it has to be protected, etc. It's not vague. When the land was rezoned for the project, the developer agreed to follow these ordinances as a condition of the rezoning.

So... none of that happened. The developer submitted a plan and didn't include any trees on neighboring parcels of land. The town's planning committee didn't notice (or possibly care), and stamped the plan anyway. Our town is perceived as "developer hostile", so our town has lately put a focus on being more developer friendly. We didn't think anything of it because we assumed they'd have to follow town ordinances and the plans showed a vegetation buffer. Instead, they clear-cut to the property line and then trenched in that orange "protection" fencing, in some cases ony 12-14" from tree trunks in our yards. Zero attempt to protect any trees on our side. Several of us contacted the town over and over while the work was happening, pointing out exactly what was going wrong and asking them to intervene. Every time, staff responded with some version of “we don’t see any violations". The buffer isn't required until the end of the project. We repeatedly asked why there weren't violations (like, did they think the trees weren't big enough, or close enough, or the wrong species, etc?), and we got nothing. Finally I did a public record request to read through the inspection and try to figure it out. There weren't any. They sent me a copy of the site plans (which are publicly available on their website). On public record, they seem to not have even come by to look at it.

Three months later, the thing we'd been complaining about happened exactly the way we said it would. Over the course of six weeks, we lost over a dozen trees. Some crashed into yards, some into fences and outbuildings, and at least one hit a baby's nursery (somehow nobody got hurt). The entire tree line at the back of my property is dead now, and these were gigantic old trees. Like 25-50" in diameter, nice big oaks, hickories, and sweet gums. The town handwaved this because we'd had unusually strong storms over the summer. Every tree that fell was in our neighborhood was in a 10' strip against the construction, no other trees were lost. They also occurred in waves, and each time one fell, I'd been at the town council right beforehand identifying it as the next most vulnerable tree. It was such an issue that we had members of the town council emailing us after storms (like at 11pm at night) to see if anybody had gotten hurt from falling trees. This also messed up storm drainage so badly that the road flooded for the first time. Previously, the road handled F5 hurricane level rains without water even standing by it. Since there's only one way in, if a tree had hit someone an ambulance couldn't have reached us.

I kind of thought this would be just an administrative thing. I'd complain to the town, they'd go scold the developers and they'd have to do... whatever it is you do when this happens. Something. I know they can't bring the trees back, but I thought they'd be told to try and save the trees that were alive before they fell. We didn't shut up about it, and the town’s position seems to have landed on "we approved all this, therefore it can't be non-compliant, because they're doing what we said to do". (This wasn't an off the cuff remark, this was at our local council meeting, from the town manager, on the record.)

In working locally, I've found at least 3 other cases where this has happened in the past five years. The main difference being that those trees weren't in danger of hitting houses, so while people got upset, they ultimately let it go.

I have multiple ISA certified arborist statements (communicated to us, and also directly to the town and the developer) and a long paper trail of emails/calls/council presentations from multiple homeowners trying to get the town to act as soon as we saw the trees beginning to fail. The developer is "investigating" possibly covering tree removal after our incessant complaining, but claimed they "didn't know this was happening"... after they gave a statement to the local TV station about it. I'd prefer not to sue if I can, but our entire neighborhood is afraid that if we don't do something they'll spend the next two years continuing to wreck our land and almost kill us because they got away with it this time.