Lula sanctions law that allows tree pruning when public body fails to act
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) sanctioned a law that authorizes the pruning or removal of trees in public or private areas when the environmental agency does not respond to requests motivated by the risk of accidents.
Law No. 15,299 allows, in these cases, the service to be carried out by a qualified professional. The rule was published in the Official Gazette on Tuesday, 23.
The new legislation amends the Environmental Crimes Law (Law No. 9,605, of 1998) and establishes a period of up to 45 days for environmental agencies to respond to requests for pruning or cutting in risk situations.
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The request must be accompanied by a technical report prepared by a company or qualified professional. If there is no response within this period, the requester is automatically authorized to carry out the service with qualified professionals.
Outside of the cases provided for by the new law, the rule of environmental legislation that provides for a prison sentence of three months to one year, in addition to a fine, remains valid for anyone who damages, destroys or mistreats ornamental plants in public spaces or on third-party private properties.
Federal deputy Vinicius Carvalho (Republicanos-SP), author of the proposal, argues that the government’s delay in analyzing requests for pruning or cutting could put people’s physical integrity at risk and cause damage to property.
For senator Sérgio Moro (União-PR), rapporteur of the project, the idea of the law is to circumvent bureaucracy and streamline procedures in the face of successive losses of electricity, which result from tree branches falling on transmission lines.
In São Paulo, tree pruning is one of the central points of the dispute between the City of São Paulo and the concessionaire Enel due to liability for successive blackouts in the city.
The company and the municipality have an agreement for the former to carry out preventive pruning of branches in contact with electrical wiring to avoid breaking wires in extreme weather events. At the beginning of December, a windstorm hit the capital and the metropolitan region, leaving 2.2 million properties without electricity.
The municipal authorities stated that the concessionaire only fulfilled 11% of the capital’s annual tree pruning plan. The concessionaire, in turn, says that it carried out around 230 thousand prunings, which do not appear in the system due to an integration failure between Enel and the Municipality’s electronic systems.
