Tree removal in Schertz

What Schertz actually regulates

Suburban lots, mostly younger trees, mostly live oak and cedar elm planted with the subdivisions. Young-tree structural pruning is the work that matters at this age and almost nobody does it.

Everything else the Schertz code attaches

What the ordinance covers

The provision covers redevelopment of residential or nonresidential property inside the city limits AND any selective or individual removal of Protected or Heritage Class trees — so “it's just my yard” is not an exemption here.

The city's stated intent

The city's stated intent is to preserve all trees within the city limits and to lay sites out so as to keep the maximum number of Protected and Heritage Class trees possible.

How it's measured

DBH measured four and one half feet above existing ground level.

Who to call

Schertz Planning & Community Development

Check your own tree against Schertz’s rule

How a removal actually goes in Schertz

Straightforward suburban lots, easy access, cheap to work. Forty-eight minutes, so it's batched work rather than a same-day call. Forty-eight minutes, the far southern edge of my radius, out where Guadalupe, Comal and Bexar counties meet. Suburban lots with easy access. Worth batching with Cibolo or Marion work the same day. Suburban streets with good access on most of it, and it's the far south end of my range at around an hour, so it works best batched with other work down that way.

Everything gets hauled away and the ground raked off behind us. Want the logs kept for firewood? Say so before we start and my crew will cut them to length and stack them rather than running them through the chipper.

The trees I get called about here

Younger suburban trees, mostly live oak and cedar elm planted with the subdivisions, out toward Randolph. At this age the tree's permanent structure is still being decided, which is exactly when pruning has the most leverage and almost nobody does it. Mostly young live oak and cedar elm planted with the subdivisions, which puts this town in the window where structural pruning still works. The other thing I see is included bark — two stems of near-equal size meeting at a tight angle with bark trapped in the union. That's the fork that splits in a storm, and on a young tree it's a two-minute fix. Schertz sits across the Guadalupe, Comal and Bexar county lines, which makes it the other town where the first question is administrative rather than horticultural. The ground is blackland running down to the Cibolo Creek bottom, and Cibolo is where the good trees are: big pecans and cedar elms on deeper alluvial soil, with the same end-weight failure pattern that pecans have everywhere. Away from the creek it's subdivision planting on clay, and the recurring problem there is trees set too deep at planting, so the root flare is buried and the trunk sits wet against soil for years before anything shows above ground.

Before you decide to remove it

A mature live oak took fifty years to reach that size and I can take it down in a morning. Neither of us can put it back. So the first thing I want to know is whether it actually needs to go — a tree that looks finished is quite often a tree that needs the deadwood out of it and nothing more. Here’s how to tell the difference, and here’s the risk check if you want to work it through yourself.

If it does need to come out, the permit side is the easy part. The rules for every town I’ve read are here, and here’s everything else I do in Schertz.

Questions I get asked