I am updating my review to address a quality report on my trees that I just received from the city. I stopped by city hall to inquire about the history of three very large, old trees on my property that I want to know how to protect. The city was able to provide me with a beautiful report that covered these three and several other trees on my property, complete with photos taken from inside my yard. The report included key information that I had sought when I hired a certified arborist back in 2014. The report from the city was dated 2015 or 2016, and had been conducted when our neighbors were doing a tear down and rebuild on their property. Yes, we had noticed back then that one day when we got home, several of our trees suddenly had metal ID tags tapped into their trunks and no one had notified us that they would be entering our property or assessing our trees. However, there was so much work going on with the construction next door and we confirmed later with our neighbor that the tags had to do with his permits and the city's canopy cover, so we were fine with it.
When I read through the excellent tree report from the city, I noticed the name of the arborist was John Deutsch. I came back to this Yelp report to verify if it was the same arborist I had hired. It is! So, oddly, I did end up receiving from John (via the city and my neighbor's build) information on key trees in my backyard. I would have loved such a report for all of the trees on my property, and that's what I thought I had hired John to do back in 2014.
So, my updated opinion is John Deutsch, certified arborist, is entirely capable of conducting and writing up assessment reports of trees. There must be some insider terminology, some key phrase that needs to used when hiring him to generate such a report, and I clearly did not know what it was when I hired him. Perhaps the difference was that I wanted the report for my own benefit, and the neighbors needed theirs to be filed at city hall? I don't know, but had I received a similar report from John in 2014, I certainly would have given him 5 stars back then on Yelp. read more