Changes at TreeWatch announced at meeting

Liliana Dones, one of the co-chairs of TreeWatch, spoke at the Village Council meeting last night, she gave a report on various tree issues that have come up lately. Ironically, the other co-chair is David Collins, who is on the Village Council and Director of the BID. There has been a conflict with this because Liliana is against most of what the BID stands for regarding trees in the Grove and David is of course, part of the big street scape project that will remove or replace trees around the Grove.

Liliana said, "I file appeals to save trees and then have to give him my game plan!" meaning that while she fights the BID on their tree replacement project, she has to alert David of her plans since he is part of TreeWatch. And rather than save trees, David is part of the plan to remove trees in the Center Grove.

Michele Niemeyer, chair of the Village Council, made a motion to have David removed when it comes to TreeWatch and the BID project and it was seconded by Jessica Lewis, a Village Council member, who felt that David is paid by the BID and this is a conflict of interest, but David took issue with that, claiming that he was not being treated fairly. By the way, David resigned from his position at the BID last Friday, but says he will remain on board until after the street scape project is started.

In the end, it was decided that TreeWatch would stand on its own and have nothing to do with the Village Council anymore, it would not be a committee of the Council as it had been, even though it really is not even a committee and is really just an organization that comes to the aid of needy trees and David Collins is no longer part of TreeWatch.

Another interesting subject that Liliana brought up was the gumbo limbo tree that was cut on Mary Street a couple of weeks ago. As suspected, it was destroyed by the Grey Line Bus company, which does the double decker tours. There were complaints from Coral Gables neighbors about the buses coming through their quiet streets; the bus company claimed that the main arteries had trees that were touching the buses as they passed, so they had to go through quiet residential streets instead where the trees were not a problem. To solve this, they apparently hacked trees that were blocking the top of the buses.

They did tell the County Public Works Department about the problem and Public Works gave them permission to trim trees. Only Public Works DID NOT issue a legal permit for this. So they seemed to just willy nilly hack anything that they deemed to be a problem without realizing what they were doing and without having any guidelines by the City or County.

Code Enforcement is now involved and mitigation trees will be planted by the bus company. I had guessed that that was the issue when I heard on the tv news on a Thursday, that they would have the route open by Saturday, two days later. I was wondering how they would get a permit so fast and how they would get the job done so fast. And then on that Friday, the trees were hacked. Now we know how they got it done so fast -- no permit and hack anything in site.