How to Request Columbia Association Remove a Tree

Ellicott City Tree Care · Updated August 2026 · 7 min read

Columbia is unusual. In most of Howard County the tree in your line of sight is either yours, your neighbor's, or the county's right-of-way tree. In Columbia there's a fourth owner — the Columbia Association — and it owns a lot of what people assume is their backyard.

What CA actually owns

The Columbia Association maintains more than 3,600 acres of open space, along with 114 miles of pathways, 171 parks and tot lots, three lakes, 41 ponds, 34 miles of stream valleys, and the 40-acre Symphony Woods. Its Open Space team maintains trees along and behind the pathway network.

The practical version: that wooded strip behind your fence, the trees shading the path you walk the dog on, the stream valley at the bottom of the yard — in Columbia, those are very often CA land, not yours. CA is direct about the misconception, describing open space as public land “not intended for the personal use of adjoining property owners nor to serve as lawns, storage areas, gardens or playgrounds.”

Note what CA does not handle. Roads, trash and recycling collection, water and sewer, and police and fire are Howard County. Covenant enforcement is your village community association. Street trees are the county's. CA's lane is the open space.

Reporting a tree — the actual channels

All three go to the same place:

• Phone: 410-312-6330 (CA Open Space)
• Email: Open.Space@ColumbiaAssociation.org
• Web form: the contact form at columbiaassociation.org/open-space/contact-us/, which accepts photo attachments — use them, since a photo of a cavity or a fungal bracket does more than a paragraph of description

CA's main line is 410-715-3000. To nominate an area for planting rather than removal, the address is OpenSpace.ResourceRequests@ColumbiaAssociation.org.

One honest caveat: CA does not publish a response-time commitment for tree requests, so we can't tell you how long it takes. If a tree is an immediate danger — actively falling, hung up over a path, into wires — treat it as an emergency and call rather than emailing. A tree in contact with power lines is a BGE call first, before CA or anyone else.

What CA will and won’t remove

CA's published criteria are risk-based. Its Open Space team removes trees that are dead or dying, that have structural defects, that could overhang pathways and pose a safety risk, and that belong to particularly brittle categories — ash killed by emerald ash borer being the current example. CA's landscape manager, a certified arborist, has framed the policy as: “We don't do any more tree removal than we have to to reduce the risk to residents.”

Read that as a threshold, not a service menu. CA is managing risk on public land, not landscaping around private preferences. What CA asks residents to report is diagnostic: no green foliage during the growing season, sudden leaning, dead branches, cavities, and fungal growths — the same failure indicators that matter on a private lot.

Why you don’t handle it yourself

CA's Open Space Rules & Regulations, Rule 11, prohibits “injury, defacement or disturbance” of open space land and, except under written agreement, “the removal or destruction of any tree, flower, fern, shrub or rock or other plant or animal in CA parks.”

Also prohibited for adjacent residents: encroachments like sheds, patios and trampolines; depositing leaves, sticks or yard waste in open space; and mowing, clearing or gardening there without approval. That last one catches well-meaning neighbors who have been quietly extending the lawn for years.

We won't quote you a fine, because CA doesn't publish a schedule of them. The more useful point is that cutting a tree that isn't yours is a category of mistake Maryland treats harshly in general — the same instinct that makes removing a shared boundary tree a treble-damages problem under the state's timber trespass statute. Report it; don't cut it.

Trees on your own lot: the village layer

This is where Columbia residents most often get caught, because the rule is not uniform across the ten villages.

• Wilde Lake requires approval to remove a tree six inches or more in diameter measured two feet above the ground — including a dead tree over that size. Wilde Lake routes tree removal applications to CA Open Space Management rather than its own architectural committee, and CA inspects before approving.
• Oakland Mills uses the same six-inch, two-foot-height standard, with the application requiring a plat showing tree location plus photos. Both the village architecture committee and CA review.
• Hickory Ridge is more permissive and spells out its exemptions: no approval needed for a completely dead tree, a tree under six inches diameter at two feet, one tree of any size per calendar year, or up to two trees of any size within 15 feet of the house.

Other villages differ again, and at least one village's published figure appears to be years out of date — so call your own village office rather than trusting a number you read somewhere, including here. If your situation is an HOA dispute rather than a removal question, our Columbia HOA tree rules guide goes deeper.

A practical sequence that avoids trouble: confirm whose land the trunk is on, check your village's threshold, get the approval in writing if one is required, then schedule the work. Reputable companies will ask about approval before starting — and should.

Tree on your own Columbia lot and cleared to proceed? We handle removals, trimming, and stump grinding throughout Columbia and the rest of Howard County, with free written estimates: 410-826-9006.