As Palo Alto officials prepare to chop down more than 500 trees at the city's golf course and to plant hundreds of other trees at various locations, they are taking a cue from the medical community and adopting as their central tenet "First, do no harm."

So said Walter Passmore, the city's urban forester and the man leading the city's effort to ease the loss of trees in the Baylands. The tree removal is part of the city's effort to completely reconfigure the Palo Alto Municipal Golf Course, a project that was spurred by the pending flood-control project around the San Francisquito Creek (which includes a new levee on the golf course) but that has ballooned its scope and ambition. Now, the City Council's goal is to make the facility profitable by emphasizing its Baylands setting and giving it what the city calls a "Wow!" factor.

This, however, will spell bad news for more than 500 trees in the Baylands, which would have to come down to accommodate the course's complete reconfiguration. Passmore, who on Tuesday night gave the Parks and Recreation Commission the latest plans for mitigating the loss of trees, said he has been working with the city's nonprofit partners -- including Acterra, Canopy and Magic -- to come up with a plan for planting new trees, both in the Baylands and it other locations, including the Arastradero Preserve. While the tree-replacement plan remains a work in progress, Passmore said, the city and the nonprofits have agreed on several principles, chief among which is "do no harm."

"Whatever we do, we want it to be a benefit to the ecosystem," Passmore said.

City officials have maintained that even with the tree removal, the golf course project will be a major victory for the environment. The city plans to reduce the managed turf area by 54 acres from 135 to 81 and to plant various native plants throughout the course site.

While the city is considering other locations for new trees, Passmore said, the city "first priority" is to replace the trees at the actual Baylands site. The goal is to restore the "values" of the trees being axed "as close to where they're being removed or damaged as possible." The second priority, he said, would be to plant new trees very close to the impacted area, in the same Baylands ecosystem. The third priority, he said, would be to look at sites close to the Baylands but not in the actual ecosystem. He described the planting of trees at other, more remote locations, including the Pearson-Arastradero Preserve, as the lowest priority.

"The foothills will be the lowest-priority location but as a default, that's certainly a viable location where historically there were more trees than what's there now," Passmore said. "Even though now it's predominantly grassland, historically there was more wooded area there."

The plan received a generally positive reaction from the commission and the public, though Commissioner Deirdre Crommie urged city officials to expand their outreach and to consider other alternatives to Arastradero.

Former Councilwoman Emily Renzel said she and her group, the Baylands Conservation Committee, is concerned about large number of trees on the chopping block at the Baylands golf course. Ideally, she said, the mitigation for all the losses would occur in the Baylands.

"Replacing some of the trees in the Enid Pearson Arastradero Preserve is okay, but we'd much prefer for the mitigation resources to be used to landscape Byxbee Park" in the Baylands.

Some of the trees currently in the Baylands, including the stone pine, will be preserved because of their adaptability to salty soil. Others, however, are not native to the habitat, Passmore said.

"It's not as easy as replacing tree-for-tree or canopy-for-canopy because we have trees that would never have naturally occurred in the Baylands that we're trying to replace a value for," Passmore said.

Linda Ruthruff, representing the local chapter of the Native Plant Society, raised some concerns about the grass city officials plan to use on the golf course. That aside, she had mostly good things to say about Palo Alto's latest plan for mitigating tree removal.

"It's easy to put in a tree for a tree, but if you're expending that amount of money and effort, it's best to put in an enhanced environmental mitigation rather than something that didn't really belong here to begin with," Ruthruff said.