Please sign this petition to help protect Seattle’s Trees!

Petition by Treepac Board Member Richard Ellison, MS Botany (click link to sign)

The City of Seattle wants to encourage single family homeowners to build additional ADU’s (accessary dwelling units, sometimes called mother-in-law units), both attached and unattached. Currently, you can build one or the other, but not both, on the same property. The City proposes allowing both, while also reducing minimum lot sizes from 4000 sq ft to 3200 sq ft and increasing the backyard structural footprint from 40% to 60%.

We believe the ADU-DEIS is highly flawed in claiming there will be no significant impacts to Exceptional Trees, Significant Trees and Tree Groves as a result of the proposed changes. Cumulative impacts, unavoidable adverse impacts, impacts to critical root zones, increased stormwater runoff, urban island heat effects, are all issues poorly addressed, if at all.

It is inconceivable to us that the ADU-DEIS cannot identify even one adverse impact, considering Single Family (SF) zones are 67% of the land and have 72% of Seattle’s tree canopy on 135,000 lots. The DEIS is silent as to how increases in lot coverage and reductions in minimum lot size, among many other issues, will be such that “No significant adverse impacts are anticipated to land use; therefore, no mitigation measures are proposed.” (The DEIS in 4.3.3 Mitigation Measures, Page 4-120 notes)

E. Fudd