The Hyde Park Tree War

My neighborhood is in the middle of a war to save its trees.

The neighborhood is 115 years old now; the developer, an agent of the Katy railroad’s land company, subdivided and sold the first lots in 1890.  It grew up and built out between then and World War II, and everybody who came along planted more trees.  As a result, we have some of the finest urban forest in the city, and we’re proud and protective of it.  (Our nightmares involve living in a neighborhood full of zero-lot-line McMansions with spindly, held-up-by-guy-wire saplings in their front yards.)  On my own lot, I have four large pecans, an elm, two hackberries (ick) a fig, two live oaks, a black walnut, and four crape myrtles.  Other people have red (Spanish) oaks, mountain ashes, old Chinese tallows, persimmons, and others.  One house has two old, BIIIIIIIIIG Washingtonia palms in the front yard!

My part of the war began just before Christmas, when we came home to find a copy of a “Vegetation Work Plan” stuck on our front door.  According to it, the city-owned electric utility was starting a “line clearance” program and the 68kV line that runs across my north property line was part of the first phase.  Their goal, I learned later, was to clear all branches within eleven to thirteen feet of “major” electric lines and within eight feet of “secondary” lines.  To accomplish this, they wanted to cut down the black walnut altogether, cut down the native variety pecan altogether, and top one of the crape myrtles.  And that was just for the front half of the lot.

I called back the arborist (a misnomer, in my opinion) for the city’s contractor, Asplundh Tree Expert Company, and in short, told him hell no, I wasn’t going to allow him to cut down any of my pecan trees under any circumstances.  His response was rather Good German-ish and ”I’m just following orders.”  He said I’d have to talk to the contact person for the City to negotiate any less cutting than what he’d specified.  I continued to be unimpressed by his opinions, his professional judgement, or his expertise, the more so as he’d mis-identified the black walnut as another pecan.  While the two trees have some similarities, they look enough different that he shouldn’t have made the mistake if he was as experienced as he wanted me to believe.

A few days later I talked with the City’s representative.  She explained that to clear the lines by the specified amount, Asplundh would have to remove so much of the pecan and the walnut that the trees might not survive, and if they did would be mutilated-looking and unattractive.  She also said that the pecan is growing a lot too close to the house (it’s true; the trunk is perhaps eight inches away from the house wall) and would have to be removed anyhow eventually.  I agreed the tree would have to go someday, but today isn’t that day.  We got out a tape measure and did a quick eyeball estimation of how much of the pecan tree would have to be cut back.  It was a lot.  Almost one whole side of the tree would have to go.

I continued to hold to my position that I wasn’t going to agree to cutting down the pecan.  I pointed out that losing the shade from the two trees would mean I’d need another ten to fifteen tons of air conditioning capacity to compensate, and did the city mean to buy me a larger air conditioning unit and pay the difference in the resulting higher electric bills.  Well no, she allowed, but the city would give me a five-gallon size sapling to “compensate” for each of the cut-down trees.  That’s not compensation, that’s a sop, I replied, and you aren’t going to cut down my trees.

In the end she agreed they would cut back the pecan and the walnut instead of taking both out.  Then we discussed several other trees on the other side of my lot, that will fall into the second phase of the project.  I agreed to let them cut down a hackberry and the two little live oaks that have grown up directly underneath the lines, and to prune back the second big crape myrtle.  I detest hackberries as such, and the live oaks are simply in the wrong place and are not only going to cause the city trouble soon, they’re causing me trouble now because they’ve grown into the electric feed line to my house.  In a good windstorm they could easily knock out the house’s power.  We did not discuss the largest and oldest of my pecan trees, which I came home one day to find they’ve flagged for pruning.  (I’ll have to throw another fit about that one in a day or two.  I think what I’ll do is to write the city a letter revoking my permission to cut any of the the pecans at all pending further negotiation.)

Meanwhile, outrage built quickly across the neighborhood.  Some residents received work plans that involved cutting down every major tree on their lots.  The January neighborhood association meeting was full of people outraged over the program; the city’s contractor was pejoratively nicknamed the “Asplundherers.”  A visiting delegation from the adjoining Hancock Neighborhood Association proposed we form an ad hoc alliance to fight the plan with publicity and political pressure.  As the electric utility is directly owned by the city, it’s easier to apply direct political pressure here than in other cities.  The task force motion carried on a unanimous vote.

The task force got into it quickly.  A neighborhood meeting two weeks ago drew a HUGE crowd who gave representatives from the electric utility, the mayor’s executive aide, and one of the city council members several earfuls on how unpopular, badly conceived, and worse executed the line clearance plan was.  It came out that Asplundh’s contract specified they are to be paid by the pound for vegetation removed, so they have a financial incentive to cut as much as ever they possibly can.  The utility also didn’t help their case by publicly admitting that they had taken no consideration for changes to the urban canopy and the environmental and æsthetic damage it would cause, had not asked the city’s forester or the Urban Forestry Board for advice or assistance, and in general had intended to do pretty damn much as they pleased.  (Part of the issue is that, because of budgetary issues, the electric utility hasn’t done any systematic line clearance in more than ten years, so they have a LOT of encroaching vegetation to remove, as they see it.)  The mayor’s aide and the city council member, however, realized they had a big political problem on their hands and promised that no cutting was going to happen without trying to find other, less radical ways of dealing with the issue.

After the meeting the task force kept pushing with the city council.  We learned a long time ago, as early as the 1970s when the association was organized to save our neighborhood fire station, that having a committed constituency, being loud about it, and continuing to push and prod are the things that will get political results.  It’s worked to save our fire station from closure four times in thirty years, it worked to get a neighborhood conservation plan passed to protect us from thoughtless and incompatible urban infill, and it worked in the tree war.  The mayor and council imposed a moratorium on the line-clearing project.  The Urban Forestry Board is taking up the case, and the electric utility has its nose in a sling because they were caught before they could complete the destruction.  They’re having to talk with the task force and work to come up with something less destructive and more acceptable to the neighborhoods.

The neighborhoods haven’t won the tree war by any means, but we haven’t lost either.  Every day we see more yellow and pink ribbons tied to trees, to remind us the Asplundherers are waiting.  (Pink ribbons mean “cut this tree down,” and yellow means “chop it way back.”)  We’re going to keep fighting until we get a solution that means Hyde Park and the other neighborhoods don’t lose the tree-lined streets that we value so much.