Imagine buying a piece of property, being ordered by the government to clear it of fire hazards, and then being handed a nearly million-dollar bill by that same government for doing exactly what it asked.
It sounds like a dystopian satire of bureaucratic overreach, but for Matthew Bernard and Lynn Warner, it is a harrowing legal reality. On May 5, the Oakland City Council passed a resolution slapping the couple with a staggering $915,135.40 fine. Their crime? Removing trees from their own quarter-acre residential lot. To add insult to injury, the city has placed a complete freeze on its building permits and threatened a property lien until the ransom is paid.
The saga began in 2020 when Bernard, a math researcher, and Warner, a registered nurse, received an official notice from the Oakland Fire Department ordering them to “remove deadwood” to comply with the fire code. Desperate to avoid noncompliance penalties, they began clearing the brush. They even hired a certified arborist who confirmed that multiple trees on the lot were severe fire hazards, destabilized by continuous drought.
But when they applied for a removal permit, Oakland’s planning bureaucracy denied it, in part because the city’s Protected Trees Ordinance “does not list fire prevention as a reason for tree removal.” Trapped between a fire department threatening fines for keeping the wood and a planning department forbidding its removal, the landowners chose public safety and cleared the hazards. Years later, when they applied to build a modest single-family home, the city ambushed them with the violation.
Oakland’s tree ordinance is a masterclass in bureaucratic extortion. Under California Civil Code § 833 — a black-letter law enacted in 1872 — the rule has always been simple: “Trees whose trunks stand wholly upon the land of one owner belong exclusively to him.” Oakland has turned this 150-year-old axiom on its head. The city behaves as though it owns every trunk and branch in town, demanding that citizens pay a king’s ransom if they dare disturb their own trees — trees that the law plainly says landowners exclusively own.
The sheer math of the penalty exposes the rot at the core of the city’s formula. Bernard and Warner bought the undeveloped plot in 2019 for $175,000. Its total assessed value still sits under $200,000. Oakland is demanding a penalty that is roughly five times the total worth of the land itself.
To put this absurdity into perspective, consider California’s criminal justice system. Under the state’s penal code, the maximum fine for malicious arson of a forest is capped at $50,000. Oakland has decided that a couple clearing dead and dying trees on their own property to prevent a wildfire is 18 times worse than intentionally burning a forest down.
Represented by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Bernard and Warner are fighting back in federal court, alleging blatant violations of the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments. They are right to do so. This isn’t local governance; it is an unconstitutional taking, and an “out and out plan of extortion,” as the U.S. Supreme Court famously characterized similar regulatory overreach in 1987’s Nollan v. California Coastal Commission.
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When cities can use preset, arbitrary formulas to impose ruinous fines without proving a single ounce of public harm, private property ceases to exist. It becomes a mere lease from the state, subject to the whims of bureaucrats who view citizens not as constituents, but as ATMs.
If Oakland wants a beautiful urban canopy, it should plant its own trees — not shake down residents who are just trying to build a home and keep their neighborhood safe.
Laura Beth Latimer is an attorney with the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Center for the American Future.