One Street Tree Between Me and the Finish Line

The Finish Line Isn't Where You Think

I thought the hard part was building seven units. Framing, foundations, electrical, a $1.37M contract. All done. And for a few weeks in July I was certain that the only thing standing between me and the Certificate of Occupancy was a tree.

One street tree. Not in the ground yet.

I was wrong, but not in the way you'd guess. The tree went in. What I learned is that in closeout, the gate you're staring at is almost never the last one -- and the reason you think it is, is that nobody has yet told you the full list.

Why There's a Tree at All

To power and plumb seven units, we had to upgrade the water meter from 3/4 inch to 1 inch. That work happens in the public right-of-way (ROW) -- the strip of city land between the property and the street. And the moment you touch the right-of-way, you enter a completely separate permit universe from the one that governs your building.

The ROW permit came with its own requirements:

A Class A general contractor (a higher license class than the building permit needed)
A separate supplemental application (form DS-3037)
A required street tree -- the city's price for letting you dig up its sidewalk
A notarized Encroachment Maintenance and Removal Agreement (EMRA) -- a recorded promise that I'll maintain whatever sits in the public right-of-way

The EMRA: Third Time's the Charm

The EMRA was a saga of its own. My architect literally titled one of the emails "Luna EMRA - 3rd Time is the Charm."

Why three times? Because the city's reviewer, an assistant civil engineer named Saad Saleem, kept finding problems that had nothing to do with engineering and everything to do with matching documents to the letter. His comment #51 explained the sticking point:

"the name of both property owners are missing the middle name on the acknowledgment sheet (the name of the property owners should matched the names on the EMRA document and grant deed to comply with the county requirement)."

Our middle names had to appear, and had to match the grant deed exactly. The notarization date on page 2 had to match the date of the actual notarization. Round after round of a document that had zero to do with whether the building was safe or sound -- purely whether the paperwork was internally consistent enough for the county recorder.

We got it right on the third pass. Saad's reply was the sweetest sentence in the whole thread:

"It's look perfect, please resubmit via Accela and let me know once you resubmit the document."

The ROW permit issued January 29, 2026. Conditions: none. Pending permits: none. Invoice: paid.

And Then, Six Months Later, The Tree

Fast forward to July 2026. The building is done. I request the final walk -- the city's last inspection before closeout. And the resident engineer, Niloofar Ahmadian, stops me cold:

"A final walk should be scheduled only after 100% of the work has been completed, including all required items... Based on my understanding, the tree has not yet been installed."

The tree. The required street tree from the ROW permit. It isn't in the ground yet. And without it, there's no final walk. Without the final walk, the ROW permit doesn't close. And here's the kicker -- she spelled out the chain:

"Your project has not yet been closed, so the Building Division cannot issue the Certificate of Occupancy at this time... Once I have closed the Right-of-Way permit, David can proceed with the building closeout."

A $2.6M project's certificate of occupancy was waiting on a sapling.

The Landscape Letter Nobody Mentioned

There was one more twist. The city wanted a certification letter from a licensed landscape architect confirming the landscaping matched the approved plans. We didn't have a landscape architect -- we had a licensed landscape contractor. So the supervising engineer, Craig Frisbie, gave the workaround:

"If there was not Landscape Architect, the Engineer of Record must sign and stamp a letter."

One more stamp, from one more professional, to satisfy one more line item. This is the part of development nobody photographs for Instagram.

The Tree Went In

Golden Roots planted it on July 27 and 28, 2026. My GC's own daily log for the 28th reads, plainly: "Golden Roots grading soil and installing plants and trees."

My Engineer of Record, Sean Canning, issued the stamped certification letter on July 27 -- he wrote it coming straight off a family vacation. On the morning of July 28 the whole package went to the city: the letter, plus twelve sequence photos showing the pit, the root ball, the backfill, the finished install.

Done. Both deliverables, in the city's hands, before the end of July.

And Then, Nothing

Fourteen days of silence.

No final walk scheduled. No acknowledgment. No request for anything else. I emailed the resident engineer again on August 11, using her own earlier offer of a site meeting as the hook. Nothing.

This is the part of the last mile nobody warns you about. It isn't that the city says no. It's that the city says nothing, and there is no mechanism anywhere in the process that converts silence into an answer. Meanwhile my construction loan accrues roughly $18,000 a month in interest with a zero-dollar reserve, which means it comes out of my pocket in cash. Fourteen days of nothing has a price, and I was paying it.

The Fourteen-Minute Reply

So I stopped emailing the person who wasn't answering and emailed her supervisor instead.

Not to complain about her. That's the mistake, and it doesn't work. Craig Frisbie is the supervising engineer who, back on July 21, was the one who told us the Engineer of Record could sign the certification letter in place of a landscape architect. So I asked him exactly one question: does the letter you required, which you already have, satisfy the direction you set? I kept her copied on the thread, along with everyone else who'd been on it. The framing was "please close out your own instruction," not "your engineer is ignoring me."

I sent it at 2:44 PM.

Ahmadian answered at 2:58 PM. Fourteen minutes, after fourteen days.

Frisbie answered at 3:07 PM. Our right-of-way contractor answered in between, at 3:04. Four messages in twenty-three minutes, on a thread that had been dead for two weeks.

I've now watched this work twice on this project. Two weeks earlier, an eleven-day silence on the electrical side broke in fifty-seven minutes the moment I copied an Assistant Deputy Director and asked one narrow, answerable question. Direct chasing had failed in both cases, repeatedly. The supervisor rung worked in both cases, immediately.

I don't think this is about anyone being lazy. These are people with enormous queues and no incentive structure that surfaces the item that's been sitting for two weeks. A supervisor's inbox is the mechanism that surfaces it. If you take one operational thing from this entire blog, take this: ask one binary question, about the supervisor's own prior instruction, with the original person still on the thread. It is not an attack, and it is the only lever I've found that reliably moves a stalled municipal file.

What the Answer Actually Was

Here's the honest part. The escalation worked, and the answer was no.

"A final walk cannot be scheduled at this time. I have already inspected the site and provided direction regarding the outstanding work."

And then two items I had never heard of before that afternoon:

A section of public sidewalk, five feet by four, has to be removed and replaced -- with the contractor's proposal routed through the city's Materials Testing Lab before anything gets poured. This appears in no email, no daily log, no punch list, and no scope document anywhere in my records before August 12. It is brand-new work, and who pays for it is still an open question.
A second stamped letter about the tree's installed location. I have a stamped letter certifying the tree was installed per the approved right-of-way drawings. She wants one confirming approval of the installed location. Those are almost certainly the same fact. "Almost certainly" is what has cost this project three weeks, so my engineer is writing two more paragraphs using her word.

There was one small mercy. She again asked for the location letter to come from a landscape architect, which we still don't have. Frisbie overruled that nine minutes later, to the whole distribution list, for the second time: "if there wasn't a Landscape Architect that designed this, then the EOR can sign/stamp the letter." I didn't have to argue it. I just had to have already asked the right person.

Where It Stands

The tree is planted. The letter is stamped and delivered. And I still don't have a final walk, because a sidewalk panel I didn't know about needs to be poured and cured first, and a letter needs to say "location" instead of "per the approved plans."

So the single most valuable thing in my reply to her wasn't about either item. It was a bolded, direct question: beyond these two, is there anything else outstanding?

Twice now she has described "the outstanding work" without ever bounding it. A walk was cancelled in July for that reason, and refused in August for that reason. Getting a closed list in writing, with the supervisor copied, is worth more than either deliverable, because it's the only thing that prevents a third round of this.

The Lesson

Two lessons, and the second one is the one I didn't have in July.

The first is the obvious one: the last 1% of a project can take as long as the middle 50%. The building being done is not the same as the building being finished.

The second is sharper. An unbounded punch list is not a punch list, it's an open-ended obligation, and you will keep discovering items one at a time, at the pace of the other party's convenience, until you force someone to write down the end of the list. I spent three weeks treating a tree as the finish line because that was the last thing anyone had told me about. It was never the finish line. It was just the most recent item.

Don't ask "is this done?" Ask "what is the complete remaining list, and is this all of it?" And when nobody answers, go up exactly one rung and ask one question.