Charlotte has a tree rule worth reading first.

Charlotte protects heritage trees at all times inside the city's corporate limits. A heritage tree is any tree native to North Carolina, per the USDA plants database, at 30 inches or more in diameter at breast height.

The Charlotte Tree Manual says that protection runs on all public and private parcels in city limits, regardless of development status, so the rule is not only for builders. It also does not reach every tree in a yard: a native tree under 30 inches is not a heritage tree, neither is a non-native tree, and the manual names further exceptions.

The Charlotte tree chapter follows the city's corporate limits, so it is a city rule and not a Mecklenburg County rule. In Charlotte's extraterritorial jurisdiction the manual says preservation requirements apply only at land development permitting.

Elsewhere in the county the answer can be stricter. The Town of Davidson, a town inside Mecklenburg County and not the Davidson County this crew works from, runs a lower threshold of its own: on the lots Section 9.3.3 of its planning ordinance covers, inside the town's incorporated limits, "No tree larger than twelve inches in diameter at breast height (DBH) may be removed without a permit from the town." Other towns in the county set their own rules, so a tree outside both limits is that town's question. The first question here is which limits the tree stands in, an argument Guilford County takes further.

A healthy heritage tree in Charlotte goes through a permit. The city publishes a non-development heritage tree removal permit for removals not tied to building a new single home, duplex, triplex or quadruplex, and says non-development customers must obtain it first. No removal may begin until that permit is issued, any applicable mitigation payment is received and the replacement plan is approved, and the city sets the form and the amount.

A failing heritage tree has other routes, each closing behind documentation.

• Sufficiently diseased, injured, dead or in danger of falling: the ordinance requires no city permit and no mitigation before removal
• Health or hazard without a permit: before removal the tree must be either signed off by an arborist holding the credential the ordinance names, or adequately documented through picture, video or other documentation
• Declining health, a tree expected to fall within one to three years on such an arborist's assessment: only that sign-off works, plus a current assessment form from an arborist holding the two qualifications the manual lists
• Imminent failure, meaning failure that has started or is most likely within minutes, days or under two weeks: the tree may come down at once if minimum documentation follows within 3 days

Whether a tree is a heritage tree, and whether its removal needs a permit, is Charlotte Urban Forestry's call. The city takes those questions at CharMeck 311, or 704-336-7600 from outside Mecklenburg County. Ask before a crew is booked, not after.

At least three electric providers reach parts of Mecklenburg County, and the numbers they publish are not interchangeable. Charlotte says trees under overhead lines are pruned by Duke Energy rather than the city, and sends concerns about those trees to Duke Energy at 800-877-9898. EnergyUnited, which describes its own territory as reaching northern Mecklenburg County, publishes 1-800-386-4833 for reporting an outage. Union Power Cooperative, which counts Mecklenburg among the five counties it serves, publishes (800) 794-4423 for outage reports. No tree company should be telling a homeowner which of them holds the line at a particular address, and the power bill names the right one. Rowan County makes the same point for its own set.

Charlotte tells residents to call 911 when a tree or part of one is blocking a road, and says its own crews cannot work near downed utility lines. The first minutes after a tree lands on a house belong to 24-hour storm response.

Charlotte's curbside limits are smaller than most tree work produces: limbs no longer than 5 feet and no thicker than 4 inches, logs under 4 inches, and no tree stumps at all.

Past the curb there is a county route. Mecklenburg County offers yard waste disposal to county residents at its full service drop-off recycling centers, and its accepted-items list names trees up to 24 inches in diameter at Hickory Grove and North Mecklenburg and up to 48 inches at Compost Central and the Foxhole Recycling Center. What a center takes on the day is the county's to answer, because load limits there change.

Whether the curb is an option once a crew has done the cutting is the city's question to answer. Charlotte's accepted-items list carries a catch-all for other similar materials generated in the maintenance of residential yards and gardens, which is not a ruling on who did the cutting, so CharMeck 311 settles that one too.

The crew has worked in Charlotte, and that job sits on the service area map as a pin, not a territory claim. A pin is a job that happened, and that is the honest starting point here.

What earns a trip this far is size. A pick nothing but a crane can make, several trees out of one yard in one visit, storm weight on a structure at whatever hour it landed, a tree another outfit has already walked away from: work like that carries its own setup at this end of the map. One small trim does not, so a small Mecklenburg job is a phone conversation rather than an automatic yes, and not an automatic no either. What the crane changes on a tight lot is on crane-assisted removal, and what decides the number is on what drives a removal quote.