Bill,
The culling of trees is a recent endeavor.
The course suffered from benign neglect for decades and decades to the degree that you could be in the left side of the 17th fairway and totally blocked from seeing and hitting the green.
Trees encroached into bunkers to the degree that they interfered with your backswing, and, many bunkers formerly well within the playing corridors were lost to invasive growth, vis a vis benign neglect.
As to the members, they have very little say. Pine Valley has just about the best form of governance.
However, with that form of governance, isolation and an air of infallibility tend to set in, and that leads to benign neglect.
Fortunately, Pine Valley finally came to recognize that tree/underbrush encroachment had diminished the value/s of the course and play on the course, but more needs to be done to recapture and return all of the features that Crump/Colt created nearly a century ago.