Lenexa Tree Removal has been taking trees down in Fairway for more than twenty years, and the most important fact about tree removal in Fairway today is that the ordinance governing it is only a few months old. The Fairway City Council passed Ordinance 1851 on June 8, 2026, and that ordinance amended and repealed the existing Section 11-94 of the Code of Ordinances. Every page, post and forum answer written about Fairway tree rules before that date describes a section that has since been replaced.

That is not a technicality a homeowner can safely skip past. The rule deciding whether a Fairway tree can come down without city authorization now lives in new text, and a reader working from last year’s advice is working from the wrong law. We quote every Fairway job against the version in force on the day the estimate is written, and our written estimates name the tree, the method and exactly what cleanup is included.

Nothing about the physical work changed on June 8, 2026 - a leaning silver maple over a driveway is the same job it was in May. What changed is the sentence a crew and a homeowner are both answering to, and getting that sentence right costs a good deal less than getting it wrong.

What Ordinance 1851 did

Ordinance 1851 was passed by the Fairway City Council on June 8, 2026, signed by Mayor Melanie Hepperly, attested by City Clerk Abbie Aldridge and approved as to form by City Attorney Jim Mosimann. It amended and repealed the existing Section 11-94 of the Code of Ordinances, and it superseded Ordinance 1721, the instrument carrying the previous version of that section. The ordinance takes effect on publication of the ordinance itself, or of a certified summary of it, in the official City newspaper.

Reading the adopted ordinance is worth the few minutes it takes, because it states plainly what it did to the section it names. The signature block and the effective-date clause at the end are not decoration either: they are how a reader tells an adopted ordinance from a draft that circulated while the council was still considering it.

Ordinance 1721 is a number, not a rule

An ordinance number is a version stamp on a piece of municipal text, and Ordinance 1721 is now the stamp on a version that no longer governs. It is still findable, still reads as official and still turns up in older write-ups of what Fairway permits, which is exactly the problem, because nothing about a superseded number announces itself as superseded. When a quote, a neighbor or a search result rests on Ordinance 1721 as the authority for what you may do with a Fairway tree, it is resting on text the council replaced.

The same trap catches the section number from the other direction. Section 11-94 is still the correct citation, since the number survived the amendment while the words inside it did not, so a page can cite the right section and still describe the wrong rule. The adoption date is what separates the two, which is why we name it rather than gesturing at the city code in general.

A repeal and replace is not a tweak

Ordinance 1851 did not add a sentence to the old section; it amended and repealed it. That is a replacement rather than a layer, so there is no older text still running in parallel for anyone to fall back on, and the version of Section 11-94 that matters to a quote written this month is the one adopted on June 8, 2026.

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What the current Section 11-94 actually prohibits

The operative sentence reads: no person, directly or indirectly, shall cut down, destroy, move or remove, or effectively destroy, any protected tree or feature tree located on covered property without first obtaining tree removal authorization. The verbs stack, and ‘effectively destroy’ is doing work that ‘cut down’ on its own does not. Authorization has to come first, which makes it a scheduling item rather than paperwork to sort out once the tree is already on the ground.

Two classes of tree, one class of ground

The prohibition turns on two things at once: the tree has to be a protected tree or a feature tree, and it has to stand on covered property. The city’s own Public Tree Protection page describes covered property as the public right-of-way along city streets together with green space and parkland. Those terms are defined elsewhere in Chapter 11 of the Code of Ordinances, and the city’s description of them is the plain-language version rather than the defined terms themselves.

Fairway publishes that the right-of-way runs approximately 10 to 12 feet from the curb and ‘varies by street width as the ROW is typically measured 25 feet from center of the street.’ That makes the question geographic rather than dimensional: a trunk’s position decides whether authorization is needed, not the diameter at breast height of the tree. We measure from the curb before we quote, because a tape answers it in a minute and an assumption never does.

The two named classes are also not treated alike. Section 11-94 sets a higher bar for a feature tree than for a protected tree, and where a feature tree is dead, dying, diseased or in decline and a threat, the ordinance routes the decision through the Community Tree Manager on a certified arborist’s determination rather than through the owner’s own read of it. That is worth knowing before anyone concludes that an obviously failing tree is an easy call.

Advice that calls Fairway unregulated

Fairway is routinely described in regional round-ups as having minimal regulation for private residential tree removal, and as to the right-of-way strip that description is simply wrong. The city’s own page is the source worth trusting here, and it is explicit that removal of a protected or feature tree on covered property is an authorization matter. Most of Fairway’s housing is one-unit detached, at 95.74 percent of the stock, so this lands on homeowners rather than on property managers with a legal department behind them.

Before a saw or a grinder starts

Whatever the ordinance says about a given tree, the right-of-way strip carries buried services, so we call 811 before a stump grinder’s cutting wheel goes below grade anywhere near the curb. Fairway was platted in 1937 and 1938, and utility routes under a plat that age are not something to take on faith from a locate someone else had done for a different job. May this tree come down, and what is underneath it, are two separate questions and we answer them separately.

Where the written request goes, and how long it lasts

A request under the current Section 11-94 goes in writing to the Fairway Community Tree Manager. Where the removal is tied to construction, the written request has to be filed at the same time as the building permit application rather than once the excavator is on site. Requested removals, if they are approved, are at the owner’s expense.

Approvals also carry a shelf life, and it catches the people who plan furthest ahead. An authorization tied to a building permit or a site plan lasts as long as that permit or plan, while an authorization tied to neither goes void 180 days after approval. An approval banked in October for a job nobody schedules until late spring can quietly expire before a truck ever shows up.

What we do with that on our side

We treat the authorization date as a fixed point in the schedule and work backwards from it, instead of treating it as a formality that will still be good whenever a crew has a gap. Proof of insurance for tree work is handed over before a saw comes off the truck, and the estimate says which tree, by which method, and what leaves the property. Where a tree can be kept - a codominant stem with included bark that cabling and bracing would hold, say - we say so and price both.

Emergencies do not wait for a business day, and a tree on a house, a car, a driveway or a power service gets a same-day response from us. The authorization question still gets asked on those jobs; the difference is that we ask it while the crew is already rolling, and nobody goes near an energized conductor during a thunderstorm or an ice storm, which ANSI Z133 forbids outright.

The span from the pole to the meter is a separate question worth settling before the day of the work, because under Evergy’s published position, vegetation affecting that service drop is the customer’s responsibility rather than the utility’s. On this side of the line, Evergy Kansas Metro answers to the Kansas Corporation Commission, which is one of several reasons the answers change when you cross State Line Road. We work both sides of it and quote each side on its own rules.

How to check which version is in force

The check is short and anyone can run it. Open Chapter 11 of the Fairway Code of Ordinances, read Section 11-94 as it currently stands, and look at the ordinance number and adoption date recorded with it: that stamp should read 1851 and June 8, 2026, and if it still reads 1721 the copy in front of you predates the change. Because an ordinance takes effect on publication in the official City newspaper, a very recent amendment can also be in force before a codified copy catches up with it.

Ask which text a bid is quoting

Any crew bidding a Fairway removal should be able to say which ordinance number and which adoption date their answer rests on, because both are checkable in a minute. An estimate that describes the city’s rules in general terms and names no instrument is an estimate written from memory. Ours names the instrument, and if the council amends it again we requote rather than leaning on what was true last season.

Keep the paper afterwards. An approval, the date it was granted and the ordinance it was granted under belong in the same folder as the estimate, because the 180-day clock and any future amendment both run from dates rather than from anyone’s recollection. On a sale or a permit application later, that folder answers in seconds a question that would otherwise be a guess.

Another amendment is a fair expectation rather than a worry. Fairway has been a Tree City USA community for 39 consecutive years as of 2023 and puts a ‘CITY OF TREES’ logo on its own materials, and a city keeping a standing tree program that long is a city that keeps revisiting the ordinance behind it. It is the same instinct that keeps the Shawnee Indian Mission State Historic Site on West 53rd Street, a National Historic Landmark whose three brick buildings date from 1839, presented on the city’s own website.

When the answer is that authorization is needed, the timeline runs through the Community Tree Manager before it runs through us, and we plan the work around that rather than against it. When the trunk sits outside that ground, the ordinance’s authorization requirement is not what decides the job, and the constraint goes back to access, which on Fairway’s tight inner-ring lots is what crane and lift work is for. Either way the debris leaves with us and the site is left rakeable.