In June, Mike and Ann Collard hired a company to remove limbs from 11 soaring oaks and two sycamores that surround their home in Glendale, Calif.; a city fire inspector told them that some of the branches were fire hazards because they hung too close to the roof. What the couple didn’t know was that three months earlier, the city council had revised its tree ordinance to include substantial penalties for pruning protected trees without a permit, and doubled the fines for illegally cutting them down.
The city slapped the Collards with a $347,600 fine. “It may as well have been $3 million. There’s no way we could pay that,” says Mr. Collard, a software designer whose wife gave birth to their third child in August.
They won’t have to. Last week, the Collards met with Scott Howard, the Glendale city attorney, who told them the city was dropping the fine altogether. For the most part, the ordinance was intended to dissuade developers from treating the fines as a cost of doing business, Mr. Howard says.”There wasn’t a lot of debate about how [it] will affect an average homeowner.” The law is currently being reviewed by the city council.
and the only reason they backed down was because it was on KFI 640 for two straight days