You know you’re not in Charlotte when …
… when you see a poster on a tree that there has to be a public hearing before it can be chopped down.
I saw this on a street tree over the weekend in Cambridge, Mass. Read the close-up below. Seems it’s state law in Massachusetts (home, you’ll remember, to godless groups and their advisers who hold fund-raisers for godless N.C. candidates).
And you know you’re not in Charlotte when, if you mention the sign to a Cambridge friend, she says, “They ought to require hearings any time anyone wants to cut down a tree.”
Even I wouldn’t go that far. Some trees are diseased. Some were just planted in the wrong place. Some are — should I say this? — Bradford pear trees.
However, trees are amazing resources and plenty of folks here waste them without batting an eye. Even Charlotte’s tree ordinance — which we are lucky to even have and which gets praise around the state for simply existing — doesn’t protect very many large trees.
The tree ordinance for residential subdivisions protects Heritage Trees, those approaching the size of champion trees for each species. But it doesn’t require saving remarkably big, old or otherwise significant trees.
An Observer story from June says the city’s considering strengthening its commercial tree ordinance. No follow-up story on whether that happened. I’ll try to get an answer later today. But I am safe, I think, in predicting that it wouldn’t require public hearings before any street tree gets cut down.
Have to run out now to — get this — talk to a college class about blogging.