Prescott Valley, AZ Landscaping Rules: Tree Removal & Heritage Trees (2026)

Section 10-02-090 is the Town's tree removal rule, and it protects trees on public land. Subsection A gives the Town Manager, or a designee, authority to promulgate the Arboricultural Specifications and Standards of Practice governing the planting, maintenance, removal, fertilization, pruning, and bracing of trees on the streets or other public sites in the Town. The Town Manager also directs, regulates and controls the planting, maintenance and removal of all trees growing now or hereafter in any public area of the Town, and must cause the Section to be enforced. In practice that means a resident cannot decide on their own to take down a tree growing in a park or the street right-of-way in front of a house.

Subsection B lists the prohibited acts. No person shall intentionally damage, cut, carve, transplant, or remove any Public Tree, allow any harmful gas, liquid or solid substance to touch one, set or permit a fire that will injure any part of one, attach electrical installations to one, or attach wire, advertising posters or signs, nails, or other contrivance to one. The definition of Public Tree reaches trees in public parks, areas the public can freely use as a park, all other areas owned by the Town, and trees on public lands lying within the rights-of-way of streets, avenues, boulevards, roads or ways in the Town.

The only exception to the digging limit is written into the same subsection: except when authorized by the Public Works Director, no person may undertake construction or development activity within the dripline of a Public Tree. The code gives excavation of ditches, tunnels, or trenches and the laying of pavement as examples.

Two related rules sit nearby. Section 10-02-010(A) makes it unlawful to trespass on Town-owned or leased land by cutting down, destroying or injuring any kind of wood or timber growing on it. The Parks and Recreation Commission, under § 17-01-025(E), serves as the Tree Advisory Commission and administers a written plan for the care, planting, replanting and removal or disposition of trees and shrubs within parks, preserves, street rights-of-way and public places owned by the Town. Once the Council accepts that plan, it is the official tree plan for the Town. A search of the Town Code for the word tree turns up no separate permit process for removing a tree from private residential property; the tree rules found apply to public trees, intersection sight lines under § 10-01-080, and site-plan landscaping.