At least one member of the Denton City Council doesn’t seem very impressed with a new consultant’s plan for a city tree ordinance. We’re not much surprised, nor much bothered, by his objections.

We aren’t surprised because we never expected the debate over strengthening Denton’s tree ordinance to be anything but contentious. The conflicts here are so basic — a developer’s need to complete a project as profitably as possible versus a city’s need to preserve its trees for reasons both aesthetic and environmental — that strong disagreement was predictable.

The only variable was who would squawk first. Councilman Joe Mulroy was first out of the blocks, worrying about the early report by Burditt Consultants of Conroe, which recommended an ordinance that mandates the retention of 40 percent of a development site’s existing tree canopy. The requirement seemed to Mulroy to present a sort of ex post facto situation that would invite lawsuits by contractors that have approved projects already on the drawing boards and suddenly find that they’re illegal under the proposed ordinance.

We got our law degree watching Judge Judy, so we’re not about to go out on a limb either way about Mulroy’s concerns, except to say that they sound pretty sensible to our layman’s ears. We will be interested to hear Burditt’s answer to Mulroy’s objections and to the many others that are sure to come up as this thorny issue — no pun intended — gets a thorough going-over as it makes its way through the circuitous process that leads to final approval of an ordinance.

Because the road to strengthening the ordinance is a long and winding one, we are not overly upset by the questions that are being asked this early in the process. They were expected, as we said earlier, and the more questions that get asked — and answered — early on, the better.

Mulroy’s questions are only the first. As he himself told the Record-Chronicle’s Lowell Brown, the Burditt report is “embryonic” at this stage; anything is possible as the debate goes forward. And the debate will be spirited, we have no doubt of that, nor do we doubt that one faction or another will deem the final result unsatisfactory.

Some of us naively believed that the original tree ordinance enacted several years ago after the rape of the old Flow Hospital hill would be sufficient, but it wasn’t, and we have seen no consensus since then on what might constitute an effective but equitable tree policy for the city.

It is going to be a long and arduous process, with each side making unappetizing concessions along the way. About the only thing we would insist on at this point is that the council makes sure the information it gets from its consultant is reliable and can withstand any legal challenges.

Mulroy’s red flag does not make us too confident on that point.