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NY S05912

Bill

Status

Introduced

7/1/2013

Primary Sponsor

Tony Avella

Click for details

Origin

Senate

2013-2014 General Assembly

AI Summary

  • Parks and Recreation Department and relevant agencies must contract with a full-time independent consulting arborist to inspect and diagnose all public trees involved in property damage, personal injury, or death within 48 hours of incident.

  • Consulting arborist must be a member of the American Society of Consulting Arborists (ASCA) and preferably a Registered Consulting Arborist (RCA), trained in tree diagnostics, lab sampling, photo documentation, and forensics.

  • Inspection reports must be publicly available online within 30 days of inspection, documenting tree condition, cause of failure, and defects or disease.

  • City must make reasonable efforts to preserve trees and tree parts at incident scenes and establish a chain of custody if the consulting arborist cannot immediately access the specimen.

  • For trees on property belonging to other agencies (Board of Education, DCAS, MTA, NYCHA, etc.), the responsible agency maintains chain of custody; City maintains list of approved consulting arborists through request for proposals process.

Legislative Description

Enacts "Yingyi's law"; requires municipal and government agencies, and individual members of the public to abstain from disposing and destroying of public trees, tree parts that are involved in property damage, personal injury or death to persons from trees growing within and across the public-right-of-ways, including parks and street trees; provides that trees and/or tree parts shall be inspected, analyzed and diagnosed for defects, disease and determine presumed/opinion as to the cause of failure by a full-time independent consulting arborist (CA) trained and skilled in tree diagnostic practices, lab sampling, photo documentation, forensics and legally binding report writing.

Last Action

REFERRED TO CITIES

1/8/2014

Committee Referrals

Cities1/8/2014
Rules7/1/2013

Full Bill Text

No bill text available