Tree Removal
in Epping

Usually, though the first job is working out whose rules you are under. Epping is a City of Parramatta ward in its own right, so the Parramatta system applies, and that system runs on height. Approval is needed once a tree or a palm reaches five metres, and council draws no line between something indigenous, something endemic and something bought at a nursery. The bar falls to three metres where the tree was deliberately planted, or where a consent condition or an earlier permit determination obliges the owner to keep it there. Height stops mattering at all in a handful of situations: heritage items and the conservation areas around them, ground the Parramatta planning instrument maps for biodiversity, Aboriginal objects and places of significance, listings on the state heritage register, and trees a development consent told somebody to retain. Five metres is nothing much on a suburban block, so plenty of trees nobody thinks of as protected are caught by it. Work out what the tree is before you measure it, though, because the triggers in that last group override the height test entirely.

Yes, and not by degree. The two councils start from opposite ends. When the 2016 boundary change moved the former Hornsby Shire land lying south of the M2 Motorway across to the City of Parramatta, North Epping stayed put, and it sits in Ward C today. Hornsby says plainly that pruning or removing a tree on private property will generally need a permit, so nothing is unregulated until it grows past a line. You have to land inside a written exemption instead. The shire tree and vegetation chapter lets a tree under three metres go where it is not standing in native vegetation, allows one prune a year that takes under a tenth of the foliage and follows AS 4373, and clears work where the trunk base, read at ground level, sits inside three metres of the footing of an approved building. Detached garages, carports and other outbuildings do not count as that building. Weed species named under the NSW Biosecurity Act 2015 come out too, as does a tree the shire has agreed in writing, on photographs you supply, is dead and is holding no native fauna. Worth raising before anyone quotes: the shire web summary describes that same three metres as running to the outside wall of the building, read 1.4 metres up, whereas the chapter reads it at the ground, trunk base to footing. On a leaning trunk or a footing wider than the wall above it, those two give different answers. Ask which one applies, in writing.

It can wipe out the size rules on either side of the motorway, so check it before you check the tape. Sydney Turpentine Ironbark Forest in the Sydney Basin Bioregion has carried a critically endangered listing under the Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016 since 31 May 2019, and what survives of it lies mostly in the Parramatta, Hornsby, Ku-ring-gai, Baulkham Hills, Ryde, Sutherland and Hurstville council areas, down to half of one per cent of the original extent still intact. Where it is present in Epping, Parramatta wants an application whatever the tree measures and however close to the house it stands, with an ecologist writing an Assessment of Significance to go in alongside it. In North Epping the effect is different in form and much the same in practice: the shire exemptions fall away on ground mapped for biodiversity, on ground carrying native vegetation that is habitat for anything in Schedules 1 and 2 of the Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016 or protected under the Commonwealth EPBC Act 1999, and on any land within fifty metres of it. That fifty metre reach is what catches people out, because a mown lawn with nothing native left in it can still fall inside the buffer of a reserve down the road.

A narrow set, and you get out through a species name or a condition rather than a measurement. A tree that has died or is on the way out can go, provided it is not sheltering native wildlife and does not stand on biodiversity mapped ground, and so can one presenting an imminent risk to life or likely to do substantial damage to the property, which is the route at clause 2.7 of the state Biodiversity and Conservation policy and can call for a formal risk assessment written by a consulting arborist at AQF Level 5. An exempt species table in the development control plan lifts another group clear of the system altogether, cocos palm among them. Pruning has its own short list: deadwood, cuts no thicker than fifty millimetres at the branch collar to pull growth back off a building where it is reaching within two metres and the tree owner has agreed in writing, and the same fifty millimetre ceiling on work done to hold clearance from powerlines under the Electricity Supply Act 1995. What none of it does is override the heritage, biodiversity and ecological community triggers. Those sit above the exemptions rather than alongside them.

Take the arborist bill and the council bill separately, because in Epping they are set by different things. On the tree work, a garden specimen under five metres commonly falls somewhere in the $450 to $1,500 band; five to twelve metres runs about $1,500 to $4,500; and a mature gum or turpentine that has to come down piece by piece sits between $4,000 and $10,000. Grinding the stump out afterwards adds roughly $150 to $500, a reduction or deadwood on one established tree $300 to $2,000, and a consulting report for a permit or a DA between $350 and $900. Read all of that as a national guide including GST rather than as Epping quotes, because it is not local research. The bigger variable is access rather than the tree: a block running level to the street gives a truck somewhere to stand and a short carry, while ground falling away behind the house takes the crane position out of the job and leaves the timber to be walked up by hand. Council charges then land on top, and they differ by side of the motorway. Parramatta publishes $151.00 for the first tree and $128.00 per tree after that, cut by a quarter for pensioner, Commonwealth Seniors Health and Veterans Affairs card holders, while Hornsby runs its applications and payments through a portal of its own. Take the figure off whichever council applies on the day you lodge.

Start by asking what ticket is coming and for which half of the work. Arboriculture Australia runs two registration categories, Practicing Arborist sitting on a Level 3 qualification under the Australian Qualifications Framework and Consulting Arborist on a Level 5 one, and both councils here reach for the consulting level when the stakes rise. Parramatta may want an AQF Level 5 risk assessment before it accepts a tree is an imminent danger, and Hornsby takes written evidence from an arborist at AQF 5 for the same call. On insurance the two part company sharply. Hornsby tells residents to sight the public liability and workers compensation certificates and puts public liability at a floor of $20 million, alongside a formal arboricultural qualification at AQF Level 2 and preferably AQF Level 3. Read that as shire advice rather than law, but it is four times the $5 million public liability Arboriculture Australia attaches to registration, with $2 million professional indemnity added for consultants. A figure typed on a website settles nothing. Ask to hold the certificate of currency itself, unexpired, issued in the trading name printed on your quote, and on a large job ring the insurer named on it.