[Editor’s Note: Ms. Osgood, a Lincoln Avenue neighborhood activist, sent this letter to the Public Works Dept. regarding the state of ailing ficus trees, a long festering problem.]
Would you be able to provide us an approximate date when you will be ready to present the ficus tree and tree replacement issue before the City Council? Initially, this was going to be placed on the Council’s agenda last June. Then it was September. Your last estimate was mid-November.
[At last night’s City Council meeting, Charles Herbertson, Public Works Director, indicated January was the likeliest date for a Council discussion of a broad new ordinance.]
We do not want the city to wait until all of the trees on our block are infected and then have to do what was done on Schaeffer Street – denude the block and leave us without any canopy. We want to begin to grow a replacement canopy now, one or two trees at a time. It is inevitable that our four trees will die from disease in the near future.
However, your staff still is waiting for our trees to revive. (We have been told that the arborist has seen no adverse change in our trees since the selective pruning a year ago.) The neighbors and I feel that they look worse. Is any objective measure available to demonstrate that the disease has not progressed on our block? Or that our four trees have remained stable? We see new indications that the disease has spread to the next tree north.
But whether the trees are maintaining or dying is not really the issue. We know that our trees will need replacing. They are old, and many are diseased. We would like to start the process now. In this we have been stymied by one delay after another, one excuse after another.
We are about to enter into Year Three on our street. We would greatly appreciate your helping to facilitate a timely resolution to our tree replacement request.
Also, the neighbors had two arborists say to us that they never have seen an affected ficus recover its healthiness. Taking them down would give more growing time to its replacement.
The longer the diseased ficus stay, the longer they can spread the disease.
Two blocks away, there is no difference between the trees in front of two homes and our trees. Why, then, were their trees replaced months ago while ours were not?
Ms. Osgood may be contacted at gardenbird@earthlink.net
