Travis County, TX Landscaping Rules: Tree Removal & Heritage Trees (2026)

973 applies to two situations: county capital-improvement and maintenance work on County-owned or leased land, easements, and rights-of-way (roads, bridges, parks, drainage, utilities, buildings, parking facilities), and private development permit or plat applications with activities affecting trees, including a tree's critical root zone, in an existing or proposed county right-of-way, even if the trunk itself sits outside that right-of-way. When it applies, the applicant or the County department proposing the project must prepare and submit a tree survey and tree assessment before the County Executive will review the plat or permit.

The survey must be certified by a Texas-registered professional land surveyor and follow current land-surveying practice for topographic, easement, and boundary work; the assessment must be prepared by a person qualified to identify tree species present in Travis County and evaluate their condition. Both documents must be consistent with the City of Austin Environmental Criteria Manual, Section 3, Tree and Natural Area Preservation, as that manual read on August 14, 2012, and must identify significant trees, propose measures to preserve them, and set out mitigation for any significant tree that will not be preserved.

Reviewers check whether the assessment is complete under the Austin manual's guidelines, whether significant trees were identified and avoided in the design, and whether it analyzes roadway clear-zone constraints and alternatives before signing off on a mitigation plan. Once approved, the tree assessment, its design constraints, protection measures, and mitigation plan become part of the approved development plan and must be built exactly as approved. Subdivision and non-residential site development plans must fold this information into their engineered, surveyed construction-plan submittal. The section, last amended by Commissioners Court Item 24 on June 28, 2016, does not reach tree removal on private property away from county rights-of-way.