The $10 Permit Nobody Tells You About in Nashville

The Curb Strip Stump Is Not Actually Your Tree

In most of the pre-war grid — Holly Street, Ordway Place, 12th Avenue South, Nebraska Avenue — there is a strip of grass between the sidewalk and the kerb, and whatever is growing in it is standing in Metro right-of-way. Metro Code Section 2.104.060 says a permit from the urban forester is required before any person may damage, destroy or remove a public tree, and a public tree expressly includes anything in the street right-of-way. Metro Water's own definition of the planting right-of-way is that grass strip, and where there is no sidewalk at all, everything from the water meter box out to the street.

So the fifty-year-old water oak that has lifted your front walk and dropped a limb across your car may be maintained by you, mown around by you and cursed by you, and still not be legally yours to remove. That distinction catches homeowners and it catches contractors, and the consequence does not land on the contractor.

What Grinding a Public Tree Stump Costs You

The administrative fee on a tree permit application is ten dollars. That is the whole cost of doing it correctly, which is why it is worth being blunt about how badly the alternative goes. The code provides that a public tree taken or damaged without a permit must be repaired or replaced in the manner directed by the urban forester — meaning the city specifies the replacement, not the homeowner, and not the company that ground the stump out on a Tuesday and drove away.

The applicant also has to notify the urban forester when the work commences and again when it concludes. Utility companies operate under an annual blanket permit renewed each year, which is why you see line-clearance crews working in the strip with no visible paperwork; that blanket does not extend to your tree guy. Metro's Urban Forestry division issues the permit and is the right first call on any of this.

Curb Strip Stump Grinding Meets the Other Rules

The tree permit is only the first layer. Physically opening the ground in the right-of-way is a separate NDOT excavation matter, and NDOT distinguishes a trench cut — work over six feet long — from a surface cut of six by nine feet or less. Grinding a stump flush in a curb strip usually does not rise to a trench cut. Chasing it out below grade with the sidewalk panel or the kerb removed does, and then the restoration standard for that panel is NDOT's rather than whatever the homeowner would have accepted.

Underneath that strip is the densest utility corridor on the property: gas, water, communications, NES secondary and Metro's own sewer laterals all run through it. Metro tells right-of-way applicants outright to contact 811 before disturbing it. And the planting geometry that governs what goes back in is a good guide to what is under there now — nothing within ten feet of a drain inlet, hydrant, power line, utility box or streetlight, and twenty-five feet back from an intersection. If the original tree was set eight feet from an inlet, its root flare is sitting on top of a Metro Water structure.

How to Handle a Public Tree Stump the Right Way

The sequence is not complicated, it is just unfamiliar. Work out which side of the sidewalk the trunk actually stood on — if there is no sidewalk, measure from the meter box. If it is in the strip, apply to the urban forester before anybody quotes the removal, and expect the replacement to be specified rather than left open. Then get the locate ticket, because that corridor is full. Then grind.

Any contractor who tells you the curb strip is no different from the rest of your yard has either not read the code or is planning on the violation attaching to your property rather than their business. Ask the question before you book, and ask it of anyone quoting you — the answer tells you a great deal about who you are dealing with, quite apart from the tree.