A flowering plum (Image: CHS)

Seattle City Council committees will have a busy Friday before the coming “spring break” week marked by many of the area’s schools and families with Kshama Sawant’s proposed legislation to limit late rent fees and new protections for the city’s trees on the agenda.

• Sustainability and Renters’ Rights Committee will take up Sawant’s proposed legislation to limit the amount of fees charged for late payment of rent and for notices issued to tenants. CHS reported on the proposal here. The rules would cap late rent fees at $10 per month. The amount matches a limit put in place for tenants in unincorporated King County in 2021. A council staff report on the legislative proposal concludes the change won’t cost the city but “potential costs of outreach and enforcement” by the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections were not reflected in the analysis. Sawant’s office, meanwhile, says, some Seattle renters “have leases that charge an additional $40 or $50 every day the rent is late” and some landlords hit late paying tenants with additional late fee notice delivery fees. The proposed legislation would also ban those delivery fees. The Stay Housed Stay Healthy coalition of 30 community organizations including Real Change support the proposal. ”All large late fees accomplish is punishing the most vulnerable members of our community even when they’ve gotten caught up on rent,” the coalition wrote in support of the legislation. The committee could vote on the proposal Friday and send it on for a vote at the full council.
• The councils’ Land Use Committee will debate a raft of proposals to extend new tree protections to the city’s urban canopy as a group of experts has come out against the legislation. The newly formed Seattle Arborist Association representing 200 professional arborists says the proposals will hurt the city’s canopy, not help it:
  The draft ordinance “not only disincentivizes tree ownership,” the letter writes, it “burdens qualified tree professionals” who care for and manage Seattle’s urban forest. Besides calling out “technical errors and lack of industry standards” in the code, SAA also calls out the code for missing its intended impact. Throughout the letter, SAA argues that the City’s tree service restrictions could have an adverse impact on the goal of increasing canopy coverage by 2037.
  Urbanists, meanwhile, say the new regulations could slow much needed housing development. CHS reported here on the proposals that backers say would create incentives and code flexibility to better protect trees, include more trees in the regulations, plant or replace more trees, and establish a payment in-lieu program to provide flexibility for tree replacement and address racial inequities and environmental justice disparities, amongst other changes. The new protections would also create regulations protecting designated “heritage trees” that can’t be removed unless deemed hazardous or in an emergency.

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