Mountain View fines Google for cutting down 800-plus trees

After Google chopped down more than 800 trees in Mountain View to make way for an office project that it later abandoned, the tech behemoth has now agreed to pay up to $703,000 to plant hundreds of new trees throughout the city.

The Mountain View City Council unanimously approved a tree mitigation agreement with Google on Sept. 9, providing some closure to long-running concerns about the status of an excavated site at 2001 Landings Drive in North Bayshore.

“Google has worked to make the location safe and have some habitat value until it’s finally developed,” Councilmember Pat Showalter said at the meeting. “They’ve cleaned it up and put in grasses.”

Google has agreed to plant a number of trees at the site, although the bulk of the plantings, 678, will be at locations other than Landings Drive. Per the agreement, Google will pay the city between $533,500 and $703,000, depending on the number of replacement trees selected by the city, according to the council report.

Google has also already planted roughly 1,344 replacement trees at Charleston Park, Shoreline Boulevard, Gatehouse and along the Stevens Creek Trail, the report said.

Five years ago, the city council approved Google’s plan to massively expand its presence in North Bayshore with an 800,000-square-foot office development near U.S. Highway 101 between Rengstorff Avenue and Permanente Creek.

Dubbed “Google Landings,” the proposed development planned for a series of cascading, five-story office buildings on a 41-acre site. The project also included a four-level garage on a separate site between Alta and Huff avenues that has since been built.

In 2022, Google started clearing a roughly 15-acre site at Landings Drive to prepare for the construction of an office building and underground parking garage. Google excavated the site and partially built the garage before abruptly terminating the entire office project last year, saying it was taking a “measured approach” to its real estate investments.

In its wake, Google left a razed construction site that had been cleared of 847 trees, including 316 heritage trees.

Since then, Google has demolished the partially built underground garage, backfilled the excavation and graded the site to its pre-development condition, according to the council report. It also has seeded the area with native grasses to help stabilize the soil.

In July, Google and the city identified more ways to improve the appearance of the Landings site, including planting new trees, the report said. Per the agreement, Google will install 14 street trees along Landings Drive and 67 box trees to screen the property from Highway 101. Google will maintain the trees until the city issues a permit for the site to be redeveloped for a future project.

The tech giant also has agreed to give the city 678 new trees to plant in locations throughout Mountain View. The city has the right to select which trees are suitable for planting and will receive $250 for each tree that it does not select, an amount that will then go towards the purchase of another tree from a third-party nursery.

Google’s $533,500 to $703,000 payment will offset the cost of installing and maintaining the trees, including $25,000 for a consulting arborist to help with the plantings.

The city council passed the tree mitigation agreement as a consent item, with only Showalter providing comment. She described the agreement as a positive step forward for the city.

“These trees collectively will contribute to increasing our tree canopy as a community, which is one of the things that provides much needed shade and helps cool our city,” she said.