It's Just Crazy...

When we moved into our new house one of the median trees was looking sickly, and we even had one gardener come by and say they were going to remove it for the former owners.

This spring it didn't leaf out, so we requested a permit via the city website, but no permit paperwork arrived. Hrmmmm. So I called and got a real person who told me that it had been sent. Okay. I requested a duplicate set, which came the very next day. I filled out the paperwork, and a couple of days later we found a notice printed on cheerfully bright paper posted on the dead tree giving neighbors a 14 day period to object to removing it.

Yup. That's the plan. Let's just wait 14 days with a dead tree looming over the sidewalk and street, so that any old random person could register a complaint about removing said dead tree - as if leaving the aforementioned dead tree in such a condition of being, well — really, very, quite dead, on the basis of a citizen complaint was even remotely a viable option. Did I mention it was dead? Well, it is.

Now, this once had been a nice tree, but it wasn't anything approaching a heritage specimen, either in species or size. On Google Maps it was already looking quite sickly in images taken before we bought the house. We love trees and are more than happy to pay to have it replaced.

It's just crazy that the city tree expert couldn't just hand me a replacement permit on the spot. Or better yet, our favored tree service is run by a state certified arborist. Why can't he do the inspection, and sign the permit paperwork, then replace it on the spot? It'd just a dead tree. There's no reason to wait two weeks and burn city resources on this.

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 09:59:34 PDT - Link