Ben Harvey: Samulski family cop $8,000 bill to protect their verge tree during home renovation

The little girl standing next to the tree that’s outside her house is my niece. Annie is beautiful and lovely to be around. Her father Justin agrees. Justin is not in the photo because he is inside the house crying. Justin and his wife Rebecca are renovating. In 2024 that alone is cause for tears but the cause of their specific misery right now is not an unforeseen bill from their builder; it’s one from his local council. Apparently the Town of Cambridge thinks the tree next to Annie is more beautiful and more lovely to be around than Annie herself. Guess how much they’re charging Justin and Bec for “street tree protection” during their imminent renovation? Not “tree replacement” or “tree transferal”, this is just to make sure nothing happens to the tree in situ while builders go about their business over the next few months. Cue dramatic music: $7866. Even Annie has the financial wherewithal to knows that’s a rip-off, and she thinks a cup of coffee costs as much as a bike. “Golly,” I imagine Justin said when he opened the bill. Actually, it probably wasn’t golly. It was likely a word that Annie knows she is definitely not allowed to say. The itemised account reads like something from Utopia. There’s $1720 for “tree protection zone fencing”. Are they expecting Hamas suicide bombers? If you are wondering what makes fencing suitable for the purposes of tree protection the answer is nothing, really. It’s the same fencing you can buy from Bunnings for about $240. And if you’re wondering if this is a particularly rare and expensive tree, it’s not. It’s not the Magic Faraway Tree or the tree from which Forrest Gump dangled; it’s a bog-standard Chinese tallow. There are a great many of them in Perth. Then there’s $3536 in aborist fees. Of the $3536, about $1900 is for a written report. Guess what the remainder goes on (cue more dramatic music)? It pays for the aborist to inspect the tree. Every week. For 52 weeks. I am not making this up. I saw Justin’s (tear-stained) invoice myself. There’s $2500 for a “street tree preservation bond” and $110 for a “street tree bond administration fee”. They get the $2500 back if the tree is alive and well a year later, which begs the question why you need to pay for everything else. If the tree is crook or dead at the end of the project the town keeps the bond to rectify the situation. You can buy a Chinese tallow that’s not much smaller than the one you see here for $375, so they’d have a lot left over for soil conditioner and mulch. Let’s be honest, there’s enough to pay Sabrina Hahn to come over and sing to it. Why do you have to pay for an aborist to inspect the tree and write a report if you are forking out $2500 on a bond that you forfeit if the tree is adversely impacted by your renovation? Apparently local councils have worked out that a bond alone isn’t sufficient to ensure trees aren’t destroyed. That’s fine. So how about raising the bond? Councillors clearly have no problem levying these things because Justin’s also getting slugged $1500 for a verge bond. As you can see, there isn’t much happening on the verge apart from the tree so I don’t quite understand why you need two bonds. Then again, I also don’t understand why the $220 “verge bond administration fee” is double the “street tree bond administration fee”, even though the street tree preservation bond is $1000 more than the verge bond. Is Annie running their accounts department? The Town of Cambridge should levy itself a stupidity bond, refundable on the completion of a term of local government not blighted by idiocy. Justin isn’t angry that he has to pay so much money to protect a tree, even though he likes it very much and would ensure it wasn’t harmed even if he wasn’t compelled to by the Town of Cambridge. And this isn’t an exercise in bashing local government (that jibe about an idiocy bond, notwithstanding). I have reported on all tiers of government for 25 years and have generally found councils and shires to usually be the most sensible civic administrators. The Town of Cambridge notes in the minutes of the May, 2023, meeting (a ripsnorter of a read) that it had “received 492 building applications in the last 12 months, with 298 being more significant developments that may impact tree health”. Something needed to be done. But . . . This is just lazy policymaking. The bureaucracy hasn’t tried to make tree protection more affordable because it has no skin in the game; the cost is born entirely by the ratepayer. The Town of Cambridge is one of the first movers on this one but other councils are going to be fast followers. So it isn’t just Justin who is going to get stung. He wrote to the mayor and some councillors to express his disappointment, by the way. They took their time coming back to him. Perhaps they were busy running themselves a nice relaxing money bath. Or busy studying to be arborists . . .