The City of Atlanta Planning Department unveiled its vision for a new Tree Protection Ordinance (TPO) at public meetings which were held in each quadrant of the city on four consecutive evenings, June 3 - 6, 2019. This vision was presented as a "draft outline" on which the pubic was invited to comment during a Q & A session. Attendees were also invited to write their comments on a feedback worksheet as well as post sticky notes to a series of eight different presentation boards in the hall adjacent to the meeting room.

The City Planning representatives at both the June meetings and the tree ordinance rewrite launch held in April said that the feedback worksheet comments would be made available online for public review. As of the date of this meeting, no public feedback had been posted by the City, but we did capture the feedback from the boards at the June 6 meeting. (Update: in August 2019, the City posted a summary of the feedback they received, although we have some concerns with how well City Planning heard what the people said, both in summary and from the sticky notes that were posted on the boards.) Although the boards were available at all four meetings, we only have photographs of the boards from the June 6 North Atlanta meeting. However, attendees who attended other meetings that same week say that the sticky note comments from previous evenings were similar to the ones at the North Atlanta meeting.

The sticky notes on the June 6 boards were transcribed and coded into common themes for a qualitative analysis of people's primary concerns. In many respects, what people are saying they want does not look like what the City is proposing. We encourage the City to step back and reconsider such things as allowing "one free tree removal a year" when this one feature received the most negative comments.