Larry Lange (seattlepi.com):The decline in park trees, largely unnoticed until now, might surprise some. City Councilwoman Sally Bagshaw, a self-described tree advocate who chairs the council's Parks & Seattle Center Committee., said "it was news to me."Howie P.S.: Wake up and smell the chainsaws, Sally. If you're wondering who to thank for this, call the City of Seattle, Dept. of Planning and DEVELOPMENT.
It wasn't to Mark Mead, forester for Seattle's Parks and Recreation department. MORE...
Steve Zemke (Majority Rules Blog):The Seattle Department of Planning and Development (DPD) is continuing a rigged phony public involvement process in seeking comment on its proposed plan to deregulate tree protection in Seattle. DPD's posting of a "Summary of Comments Received on DPD Tree Regulations" does little if anything to clarify the issues involved in trying to protect trees in Seattle or help in drafting real urban forestry and tree protection legislation.Howie P.S.: Steve Zemke is tracking this issue like a hound dog and I keep having to play catch up with him. Lest you think Steve is some crackpot, check out this article in the Seattle Times, from May, 2009: "Seattle's tree management needs revising, the city auditor says."
The problem starts with the fact that the very people who produced the summary are opposed to tree regulations and proposed to deregulate all tree protection for the City in their draft document. They ignored the Seattle City Council's resolution #31138 urging development of a proposal to increase tree protection and chose to propose the opposite by wiping out the existing protections for mature trees and tree groves and proposing instead to "provide incentives and educate people to save trees". They cited no examples of where this has worked elsewhere.
Now, rather than publishing the actual letters and comments of those that gave input on their proposal, like other cities have done (eg see Shoreline's public comments on their tree protection proposal here) , DPD choose instead to anonymously publish what seems to be their edited "notes" of so called public meeting comments and and written comments. MORE...
Steve Zemke (Majority Rules):The Seattle School District is going to cut down 27 trees tomorrow Friday Jan 28, 2011 (about one quarter of the NW Grove) at Ingraham High School. For several days the School District has been assembling equipment and preparing to cut down the trees. Tomorrow students have the day off.
Tonight just before dark I went over to check things out once again and asked a worker in a hardhat when they were going to cut the trees down. His response was that "tomorrow the trees would be screaming". It's strange but I could not think of a more apt response for the trees.
If Seattle Mayor McGinn has his way, no trees in Seattle will be protected from destruction. Ingraham is only a precursor to many more trees being lost because Mayor McGinn is proposing to deregulate all tree protection in the city. Strange that someone who supposedly ran with a label as an environmentalist has no love for protecting Seattle's green infrastructure. When we tried to talk to McGinn and his staff about saving the Ingraham trees he choose to ignore us and wouldn't even schedule an opportunity for us to discuss the situation with him.
(SNIP)
The Seattle School District had prepared an Ingraham Master Plan showing they could build the addition on the open lawn on the North side without having to remove any of the tree grove.
Yet the School Administration under Superintendent Goodloe Johnson and the Seattle School Board has turned a blind eye to environmental issues, choosing not to help increase Seattle's tree canopy but instead gouge a chunk out of it by removing some of the city's oldest trees. What a great lesson for Seattle students about how to live in a world where we are increasing threatened with drastic climate change and environmental degradation as our population and use of the world's resources increases to have an ever expanding economy based on consumption. MORE...
Consider sending 10 emails as your Christmas present to yourself. 1 email to each of the 9 city councilmembers, and 1 to the Mayor could be what it takes to get them to think that the long term health of our urban forest will be how their terms of service will be remembered by future generations. It might take some of the sting out of knowing that they definitely will be remembered for allowing the Ingraham High School forest to be logged on their watch.Here’s a reminder of the ‘plan’ to convince the Seattle City Council to implement a comprehensive tree policy.We need to issue a draft tree ordinance to counter the regressive DPD proposal that is currently on the table.
View this PREPOSTEROUS 2:46 second video taken at the rollout of the proposal on July 14th, 2010. We were completely blindsided when the city proposed to eliminate all city tree ordinances.The authority of different departments needs to be combined. The UF IDT Urban Forestry Interdisciplinary Task Force needs to be given tree czar power. Can it be shown that the new mayor is willing to buck the power of the department directors? Maybe we need to begin campaigning for the next election with our ‘environmental voter scorecard’?
