City Plots Ways to Save Trees

It was 8 a.m. when the sound of buzz saws began to fill Village Trailer Park on Colorado Avenue. Within two hours 15 trees - some more than 30-years-old - were strewn across the median running down the center of the park.

"A couple hours undid 40 years of nature's work," said Councilman Kevin McKeown, who witnessed the "clear cutting" on Thursday, March 23. "They were totally healthy trees. I felt like I was watching them cut flesh."

On-site manager, John Niepoetter, said the trees were removed to make way for more on-site parking. Residents said the act was a move by the management to make the park - which is plagued by health and safety code violations - unattractive, prompting tenants to move out.

Whatever the reason, the cutting comes as city officials research ways to expand their two-year-old Community Forest Management Plan to include trees on private properties. The measures being explored could include an ordinance.

Only a handful of cities have ordinances in place regulating trees on private property, including the California cities of Antioch, Thousand Oaks, Galt and Burlingame, as well as Whitting, Ind.

Community Forester Walter Warriner said he is in the process of studying those ordinances. Warriner will use the city's Community Forest Management Plan as a guide when crafting a possible ordinance, which was listed as a city goal during last year's budget hearings.

"The main objective is not so much to regulate what goes on on people's property," Warriner said. "It's more to give the community greater awareness of the benefit of trees and how to work with trees. We're looking for solutions to problems."

Warriner will meet with other city officials to map out the components of the measure and determine whether or not the plan will take the form of an ordinance or policy paper. Warriner said he expects to have recommendations ready for the City Council in late spring.

"I don't see this ordinance or policy paper as being an enforcement type policy, making people keep trees on property or making them plant trees," Warriner said.

Warriner said the loss of healthy trees can have an adverse effect on an area. With the canopy of branches gone, heat will be absorbed by homes instead of branches, and during the rainy season, there will be more run-off and the condition of the air will be adversely affected.

In the trailer she and her husband Marshall have called home for nine years, Darlene McNama goes through stack upon stack of photos of the park's center median. There are before shots of Norfolk Pines, Yucca, Palm and Magnolia trees and after shots of sawed up trunks and holes where the trees once stood.

The grandmother of three has become a vocal opponent of J&H Management, Inc., the company that manages the park. McNama contends the management is trying to drive out tenants in the park that boasts 109 trailers, 43 of which are under rent control, and which is reportedly up for sale.

"The owner of this place doesn't want us here," said Darlene McNama, who chairs the park's resident association. "We have watched them deliberately destroy this place."

Management said that after consulting with the city, they decided to remove the center medium to create more parking, after residents were told they could no longer park across from the median because the streets are too narrow for fire trucks.

Building inspector Tim McCormick sent park management a letter stating that it was not necessary to remove the trees in order to comply with the parking requirements.

"We have received expressions of concern from your park residents about the proposed removal of trees," stated a copy of the letter taped to Niepoetter's door on the morning the tree cutter's trucks arrived. "This letter is sent to confirm that the City of Santa Monica has not directed you to remove the trees to comply with any notice or order we have issued."

Niepoetter said that when he saw the city's letter taped to his office door, he didn't think to call off the clear cutting because he said the city had approved a plan to remove the trees for the parking spaces.

"I think it was a letter to take some heat off the city," said Niepoetter. "I didn't think to stop them [tree cutters] at all… Also it's not the end of the world with all these trees. To an extent that center piece is strictly for parking."