Hazardous Pine Trees--A Rapid Response is Needed

UPDATE 8/8/2022: The HOA has had a tree company survey all of the trees on the common-ownership property and identify hazardous trees that need removal. This looks like progress. We are hoping this new list of targeted trees overlaps 100% with the (shorter) list of trees that residents have expressed concerns about, such as those described here. Stay tuned. –S.L.

It will be expensive. $2,000 per tree to pollard 25 trees equals $50,000. Double that if you wish to remove them all the way to ground level instead. (Estimates.) But we have no choice, if we care about the safety and lives of Quail Valley HOA residents whose homes are within the fall lines of these old pine trees. (I first reported about this problem on 6/14/2021)

The HOA collects $600,000 in dues from us annually. Preventing injury and death must be the #1 priority of the HOA. We can afford this job, borrowing money to do so if we need to.

The HOA should never have planted these 70-foot-tall white pine trees 30, 40, or 50 years ago. A few might have been planted by the original developer. Either way, our current HOA must take them down ASAP, and not rely on "insurance" to "make things better" after the injury has occurred. Large trees uproot every few years in Quail Valley, and strong wind events are increasing in our state.

To mitigate today's hazards, residents are asking the state's attorney to get involved. We don't need our budget to be spent on gutters on a barn or a picket fence around the perimeter in order to live. We need these tree hazards mitigated so that we are not injured or killed. Residents have begun placing yellow CAUTION/CUIDADO tape around the hazardous trees, hoping to speed up the response of our elected officials. [Added on 11/2/2021: A licensed arborist must evaluate any tree over 20 feet per Maryland State law.]

Our elected officials can get involved when it comes to the safety of residents. It was barely a year ago that the Montgomery County Council finally passed a law halting HOAs and landscapers from spraying neurotoxic (and possibly carcinogenic) chemicals all over the common lawns. Thank you, counselors. That was a home run.

Today, again, we see a municipality (the HOA) devaluing human life, and we observe bad actors making profits when residents are harmed (when houses flip ownership). Negligence and greed, respectively. Is that what we want: the same old same old? Or are we striving to build a more just community?

Also, there is incompetence. We should not hire the tree surgeon again who (while giving our HOA the lowest bid, perhaps?) made exactly the wrong cut on 18 of these hazardous trees, right at the entrance to Quail Valley three years ago. (See graphics, above.)

Today, residents are asking for a 50-year land-management plan that will move Quail Valley away from a high-CO2-emission landscape (vast, mowed lawns) and onto a more sustainable path. The HOA can work with extension.umd.edu (avoiding commercial landscape companies) to develop the plan. We would construct RainScapes in places where the ground is eroding along the edges of storm drains in the common grassy areas. We would adopt a list of recommended trees (native Maryland understory trees that do not grow too large) for residents and groundkeepers to refer to. We would have a welcoming conversation with each new resident, offering them a flier, in their primary language, about waste management, recycling, and land use in Quail Valley. (See this great Montgomery County website on recycling. They also have free paper fliers in ten different languages at the Shady Grove Recycling & Transfer learning center.)

But first, we must attend to "the health, safety, and welfare of the residents," per our HOA Covenant. This is urgent. Our local municipal government, the HOA, must mitigate the hazard of these giant trees.

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Read various Chapters of "Living on Cuckoo Court" at tinyurl.com/CuckooCourt.
Read about condo and HOA "dysfunction, corruption, and abuse" all across America at IndependentAmericanCommunities.com.

Thank you M.J. for the oral history, M.T. for arborist advice, and J.S. for drawings.