Does this City Council have the will to Save our Trees?

A few weeks Councilman Kirsch suggested we double the price to take down trees in the City of Highland Park. Now some of you would probably think I would jump up and down with excitement on this proposal, but I didn't, and here is why.

First of all I miss David Weber working with me on the tree issue since he was the main force when we wrote the ordinance back in the early 90's. There was a man who not only talked the talk of saving trees but also DID. This administration has been compromising forest after forest of trees and allowing anybody to build over areas where 100 year old oaks once stood. This has not gone ahead without this City Council condoning those actions. Several years ago I tried to sit down with staff and members of the environmental commission to address this problem and was totally stonewalled by staff. At the City Managers prompting, the City Council reacted by making it harder for commissions to form subcommittes without direct council approvals.

What I have to say to my fellow Council folks and the Mayor is you first must be willing to tell people that they can't cut down these forests. We must take a stronger position in protecting these trees. That does not mean that you tell people they can't reasonably build on their lots but you just get tougher. There is not a tree in this city today that can't be negotiated away by our staff and that gets me sick. Councilman Levenfeld was right several years ago when he said, "we don't have a preservation ordinance, we have a replacement ordinance" Just raising the price of replacement trees from 200 to 400 for cutting down these trees will not do the job of saving these forests when your talking about multimillion dollar improvements.

We need to stop the talking about improving tree preservation and change our ordinance and our administrations enforcement of that ordinance. We need to walk the road to REAL tree preservation now.