HAVING a single canopy target covering all of Fremantle could be hindering the council’s ability to green the city, says a Hilton councillor who’s called for a thorough review of the city’s current approach.
Cr Ben Lawver’s motion follows a decision in November to slash the City’s street tree planting targets for the next two years from 2658 to just 1200, and a late planting season that saw a high mortality rate (“Not sticking,” Herald, November 4, 2023).
Cr Lawver says it’s a good opportunity to hit the pause button.
“Currently our Urban Forest Plan has a target of 20 per cent canopy coverage across all of Fremantle, but having one target doesn’t recognise the challenges different spaces have in building and retaining canopy/vegetation cover,” he said.
• Vicky Wright and Shane O’Neill are building a tiny house around several mature trees in their Hilton backyard. Photo by Ben Lawver
Denuding
“Creating individual target for specific areas would allow for bespoke solutions to address challenges and provide pathways to reach (or exceed) the overall canopy targets outlined in Fremantle’s Urban Forest Plan.”
Pointing to aerial views showing the denuding of Hilton through infill between 2009 and 2021, Cr Lawver told the Herald that and the recent scouring of land for public housing developments made him realise the city needed a new approach if the suburb were to retain its heritage characteristics.
“The policy specifically mentions large mature trees in the streetscape.
“Our heritage people will pull up folks for destroying or impacting the streetscape if they want to change the weather boarding on the side of their house, but we’ve allowed all this.
“Here we had approved buildings, a memorandum of understanding, the state government had said ‘we want to have trees’ and yet Dale Alcock says ‘I can’t build a house unless I cut them down’.”
Cr Lawver said the review would also look into ways of providing incentives for owners and developers to maintain more mature trees, saying just near his place is a couple who have decided to build a tiny house in their backyard and have designed it to fit around the existing trees.
“In our tree planting program we just focus on verges and parks – why can’t we put a tree in someone’s front garden?
“That could be an easy way to scale up our planting program.
“We can put whatever requirements we want on that, like ‘show us a picture of the hole the tree is going in’ or whatever.
“But once that tree goes into someone’s private property, we don’t have to maintain it.
“So there is something we have to do on private property, but as you see, that’s where we’re losing so much canopy,” Cr Lawver said.
Another option flagged in his motion is looking at changing the council’s significant tree register to allow residents to voluntarily apply for registration of trees on private land.
His motion was approved unanimously, and council staff now have six months to come back with a report.
by STEVE GRANT