Treesavers
Pulls Case, for Now |
By Jorge Casuso
October 25 -- The Downtown ficus trees won’t be
seeing their day in court, at least for now, after Treesavers took
a motion for a preliminary injunction scheduled for Friday off the
docket.
The motion to halt the City’s plans to compost or relocate 75 mature
ficus and palm trees on Second and Fourth streets is unnecessary because the
tree activists filed an application to declare the trees along the streets city
landmarks, Treesavers said.
“Since the trees are protected by the Landmarks application, Treesavers
felt there wasn’t an emergency required court intervention at this time,”
said Jerry Rubin, a local activist who is leading the effort to save the trees.
“We really hope to work with the City through the landmarks process to
save the trees,” he said.
City officials -- who planned to begin removing the trees immediately if the
court ruled in their favor -- were forced to switch gears after the City accepted
the unusual landmarks application last week.
Since the application was accepted, City officials have been negotiating with
State and Federal agencies funding the $8.2 million streetscape project in an
effort to ensure the funding is not jeopardized by the delays and potential
changes in the plan.
Rubin said that Treesavers has not dismissed the case and is waiting to see
if the City cooperates.
The case is “still pending awaiting the outcome of the landmarks determination,”
Rubin said. “If the City doesn’t cooperate, Treesavers is reserving
the right to go back to court in the future.”
Filed three weeks ago, the lawsuit questions the process that resulted in a
contract for the streetscape project authorized by the City Council in August.
The plaintiffs argued that the City should have conducted an Environmental Impact
Report (EIR) before it issued the contract for the work.
The City countered that a full-blown EIR was not needed, because California
Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) reviews had already been conducted in 1996
and 1997, when the Bayside District Specific Plan, which included the streetscape
project, was approved.
Unlike applications filed in the past to landmark individual trees, those filed
by Treesavers seek to declare the entire rows of trees along each
of the two streets as landmarks, making them perhaps the first applications
of their kind in the city.
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