The celebrations surrounding the rejection of the tree ordinance give me a certain familiar feeling. The feeling I get when I see some idiot burn his neighbor’s house down on the Fourth of July. The feeling I get when I read about someone getting blown away for having the audacity to roll up to the wrong house while delivering a pizza.

Let’s open a hypothetical. We own a residential lot in the City of Kingston of average size. There's a healthy oak tree that's got to go. His roots take up the entire property so after 150 years he's getting removed. He's not getting a haircut — all 20,000 pounds of him gets chopped, chipped and shipped elsewhere. Crew, crane and clean-up cost between $4,000 and $5,000. Let’s say the tree ordinance passed. While his roots spanned 6,400 square feet and he towered above at least 80 feet, his moneymaker (his trunk) measured 30 inches in diameter. Under the ordinance, our oak falls into a special category as a “Heritage” tree. Its value to our ecosystem adds a $150 surcharge per inch. So first, there's a $4,500 surcharge.

Next, we have something of a choice. We could replace the tree. We can’t go buy a 30-inch diameter tree, we need to get two-inch diameter saplings. We need 15 and we can’t drop them at City Hall or plop them in the dirt at Forsyth Park. They have to be planned and planted. Obviously not all on our hypothetical 0.11 acres of now tree-free property. We would need to spend time, effort and probably upwards of $9,000 to plant these trees on city property.

Alternatively, we could pay the city the value of the tree. Our oak has a “unit tree cost” of $37 per square inch. We multiply that by the tree's cross sectional area (15 times 15 times 3.14 = 706.5) to get the value of a perfect oak tree of equal size. Our hypothetical tree was perfect, so we’ll skip the depreciation math and pay the city for a perfect tree. A healthy tree keeps 90 percent of its value; a dying tree drops to 30 percent. Since ours was perfect, we would have to pay the city the full value of $26,140.

To take out our perfect oak tree we pay between $16,000-$35,000, depending on whether we want to spend time and effort to plant 15 trees or not when normally we’d just pay the tree company $5,000. Why? Because the city is “progressive”? Because the city is padding the coffers? Because the bureaucratic government is out to get you? Actually, it's because that tree is critical infrastructure and prior generations failed to treat them as such. Its massive canopy and root system absorb thousands of gallons of rainwater, keeping it out of the city's ancient and often overwhelmed sewer system. It actively filters particulate matter from car exhaust and dramatically lowers the ambient temperature of the surrounding asphalt, reducing the "urban heat island" effect. You take out our healthy, century-old oak, that biological structure is gone, and no amount of money can replace it in a human lifetime. An immense tragedy. When the volume of stormwater is too high, it overwhelms the treatment plant, causing raw sewage and street runoff to overflow directly into the Rondout Creek and the Hudson River. Every mature tree canopy functions as a giant umbrella and sponge, sucking up thousands of gallons of rainwater before it ever hits the ground. Kingston's overall tree canopy covers exactly 38.2 percent of the city and any removal of healthy trees from it should be flat-out excruciating. I also want to make sure I point out invasive, diseased, dying or hazardous trees can just go without being replaced or paid for. The city isn't trying to protect your 80-foot Tree of Heaven.

When I see people cheering victory over the government’s foiled plans to come onto their property and interfere with their right to accelerate our doom, I get that feeling. I also get the feeling that the amount of people who are genuinely afraid of choosing between their fortune and being free of their tree isn't very high. Let me ask you. Do you own property with a tree you hope to get rid of? Does the stormwater flooding affect you? On what phase of the capital project is your kid's school going to finally get AC? How many generations are you expecting to let your kids lead?

The trees may be on their property, but they live in our world. Speak for the trees.