A Fight For Our Trees

Sometime around 2003-ish, I had a day job and also was the night Shift at Rude Awakening coffee house. In those days we closed at midnight Mon-Sat. We had heard rumors that the city wanted to cut down the trees on Hay Street. Being two Downtown Alliance activists, Greg Hathaway and I had talked about what steps to take if the rumors were true. One was starting a citizens’ petition and the other was making some buttons. It was the era of wearing your causes on pinbacks. Way before online graphics to grab and canva-type products we had CD’s with 100,000 clipart images. So this button was created and we had about 100 made just in case.

One evening around 6:00 pm, I was working at Rude and had a few customers inside and some sitting outside, and I stopped a couple of downtown neighbors (I’ll name them if they chose to be outed as heroes). They had come from city hall and had heard there would be a council vote at that night’s meeting to cut down the trees on Hay Street. So I ushered the customers inside out, put a sign on the door “Gone to Fight City Hall, Be Back As Soon As Possible, left chairs and tables outside, locked the doors, and walked down the street with my bag of buttons.

The meeting hadn’t started yet and it happened that there was a Boy Scout Troop there that was going to be recognized. I signed up to speak (the good old days when you were able to react to last-minute shenanigans). I went around to each of the scouts, gave them a button, and asked them to please put it on. And they did. I walked up front and gave a button to each council member.

I spoke about the trees adding so much to our streetscape, and how strongly the citizens of Fayetteville felt about not cutting them down evidenced by the amount of petition signatures gathered in just a few days. Not everyone was swayed. One councilman offered to buy the gas for the chainsaws out of his pocket.

In the end, city staff and council listened to the citizens, and the trees were saved.

In subsequent years the trees and their health and habitat are mentioned. The Alliance proposed a plan of 2-3 trees being replaced each year to allow for staggered removal if they were actually ever deemed by an arborist as having to be removed. The arborist felt they could be saved.

In 2020 a tree committee I sat on resulted in a great plan to maintain the trees, keeping them healthy enough to last several more generations. The expertise of Charlie Allen of Green Biz and his work to create a way to maintain our green space with healthy trees was mostly ignored due to the cost of the plan’s implementation and upkeep.

Now about 20 years after keeping them from being cut down, this year’s proposed budget is $50,000 to cut down the trees. Monday night at city hall I spoke in opposition. New small trees planted now will take 30 years to look as beautiful and have the canopy we currently have. There is a viable plan to keep them healthy and that should be where we direct funds in the budget.