Dead/Dying Trees in Common Areas

Ray,

I recall another thread on here a few months ago about the liability of falling trees.

This is from memory so it may not be correct: the owner of a fallen tree becomes liable for damages if he is made aware of the problem before the tree falls. Otherwise, there is no liability.

I am not sure how many trees you have to worry about but there should be money in the budget and in reserves to deal with tree trimming/removal/replanting. This should not be a budgetary surprise.

Ask yourselves what will happen if a tree that you knew was a problem falls onto a home? How much will that cost to remedy? What is your insurance deductible and how many claims can you make before your carrier drops your association?

Can any of the these trees be turned into wood for fireplaces? My experience has been that removal of a cut-down tree is the most expensive part of the job. If you can get homeowners to take the material off your hands you are money ahead.

Tim's plan is solid to remove trees and seems sensible for the economic climate. Basically, any tree that is leaning any direction is theoretically at risk of falling and can be defined as such by professional "tree people."

Create a budget expense item.

Have a frank discussion within the community about whether the community should raise special dues or increase regular dues to cover the expense.

Create a tree trimming/removal budget item to solely handle the individual job

Target the most urgent trees for removal within that budget.

Repeat every year

When the urgency has passed, reallocate your tree budget to match the ordinary maintenance needs of your trees.

People can argue that the HOA should know the condition of its trees and therefore has under-funded the effort, leading to a maintenance "crisis." I don't think that's true in this case. This is a special and rather unusual case that you can handle with proper planning. My opinion is that the HOA is not negligent if it begins its planning to adjust its spending for tree removal. A tree might fall but there's only so much an HOA can do given their abilities to meet, debate and approve policy changes. I'm not sure I'd tap Reserve Funds to cut trees - enough "stuff" gnaws on reserve fund levels to keep them low.

I went through this exact situation. We had some Southern pine trees on the boarder of the property. I had a professional arborist come and do an evaluation. A few of the trees showed signs of pine beetle infestation. Which spreads between trees pretty readily. The beetle made the trees a risk of falling over. The debate we had was that these pine trees (and others) were there at the beginning of the development. The developer just never cut them down when developing the land. At the time the trees were not very large. Now they are about 30 feet in the air or more. So the debate then became who's responsibility for existing or planted trees?

Our HOA one owns the lot and the house the house sits on. Outside of that it is considered "Common property". Which you can have some "exclusive use" of in your yard. The HOA was responsible for the common areas and this allowed us to be able to mow everyone's yard. This meant that we also were responsible for what was planted on the property and discouraged large tree plantings. So the existing trees became a serious issue as they got larger and more unstable. We eventually had several trees removed and spent a few grand on the project. (Bradford pears were a BIG issue and banned those).

However, as for those large pine trees on the boarder, we could NOT afford to remove those. They were atleast 2K a tree. Having atleast 3 trees on that list made it impossible. Our budget was 5K a month and we collected right at 5K a month. No extra money and would have to have a special assessment. Most people were for removing those trees as we all had those concerns but no one was willing to fork over the special funds to do it.

Eventually, you can tell, one of those trees did indeed fall over on a house. My last week as President of course. The tree was on piece of property but fell into the neighbors. It turns out the owner with the tree did not have insurance. That meant the home next door insurance had to handle the issue. The HOA's responsibility turned out to be to provide the cleanup of the tree debris. A $1500 bill people were none to happy I paid out for that. The tree also went across a fence between the two houses. However, fences are NOT maintained or installed by the HOA. We just APPROVE them. Meaning that the fence damage would be the individual owner's responsibility to pay for the repair.

The lesson learned from this is to consult your insurance company on the responsibility. Do NOT assume certain liabilities or lead people to believe any. These owner's and other believed the HOA would be responsible for paying the homes repairs. Not true. We had to pay for the CLEANUP and removal of the tree/debris. The owner's insurance is to pick up the damages. If anything the HOA may have to pick up their deductible worse case. So do your research and then weigh the damage versus removal. You will be surprised as what you think isn't the reality...

Our area has been hit hard by Emerald Ash Borer and we've been losing a lot of Ash trees as a result. Our solution is to let residents cut them down for firewood. However, none are threatening anything other than other trees in our common area. No risk of damage to dwellings at all.

Ray, what are you getting for the couple-few thousand dollars per tree? Cut down, and completely removed from the property? Maybe a cheaper option is to have it safely put onto the ground in the common area, or laid down and cut into logs for residents to take away? Yeah yeah yeah, liability and all that stuff will be the usual concern.

2K seems awfully high for any tree unless it's some 150ft (100 yr old) specimen. At one time, the Board was using the big 3-4 tree companies here in Northern Virginia and they were outragious. There are plenty of good, professional,licensed and insured tree contractors out there. When we started getting bids from different companies, the prices where all over the board (no pun).

Depends....

Is it HOA land, or is it privately owned land within the HOA. BIG DIFFERENCE.

Although someone might pay you to cut down a hardwood tree in the middle of nowhere, where it cant hit anything. They are quoting $2,500 to cut down a tree 3 feet from your $300,000 house.

You're paying them to be careful and not destroy your entire house. This will take considerably more time, skill and equipment.