I really like the people behind the rebuilding of the Lafitte Projects. They’re nice. They said the new development will have many green and innovative features. But evidently everything must fit in nice square spaces and these trees are just not part of their vision for what the neighborhood should be.
30+ mature trees cut, 7 retained. And the beat goes on.
See all the pics and story here: http://dyingoaks.posterous.com
Good grief. I’m still trying to get to the bottom of this latest horrible development. Evidently the City of New Orleans bears some responsibility for restoring Harrison Ave through City Park. Not only are they widening the road–to the detriment of the oaks–but they’ve specified that a path be cut, evidently for sidewalks. Even the construction crew was surprised at the technical specifications which called for them to bulldoze the path. Now the trees have had their roots severed and are destined to be compacted and be abused by suffocating additions, likely concrete.
Why is it that as we rebuild we are killing so much of what matters in this town? What the floods didn’t take, stupidity is.
I couldn’t post all the pictures here so I built a Posterous page with 27 pictures. You can find it here at http://dyingoaks.posterous.com
Who is responsible for this latest crime against our quality of life?
After sending a still-unanswered correspondence about how the new Great Lawn project was damaging one of the older trees in the park, I noticed that these signs went up. Doesn’t that make you feel better? No? I thought not.
I did learn that the park’s primary contractor for tree “care” has now written a prescription for the tree. So, after the destructive acts committed against this beautiful and iconic oak by the design team, management and the construction company, the park is suddenly looking after the health of the tree. Ah, irony is a bitter and repulsive dinner sometimes.
Special note: I want to apologize if this post ruffles feathers. I admit that I am frustrated. I feel like I’m watching a loved one being assaulted and I’m supposed to be diplomatic and say, “please stop hitting her.” I pray that I find the inner-peace, wisdom and tact to evolve into a more effective and less-pointed advocate for a better world. For now, however, this is what I’ve thrown out there to try to find “light in the darkness of insanity” to quote Nick Lowe. I only want the best for City Park and our precious Louisiana. SP
Here are the gory details:
Well paid City Park designers, contractors and staffers continue to abuse and kill the precious live oaks under their stewardship. The Great Lawn project, part of the park’s Master Plan, is currently under construction. Just as with the Pavillion of the Two Sisters, a project that killed nearly a half dozen trees with at least one still barely holding on; and, with the loss of trees in the Sculpture Garden ongoing, all due to bad planning and implementation that failed to properly protect the soil and delicate root systems of the trees, the park is in trouble.
As I said in a previous post, City Park is being paved over. Already, an acre has been slathered with a suffocating coat of toxic asphalt. The Master Plan calls for many more acres to be encased in life-starving, impermeable concrete and asphalt because too many people in charge don’t know readily available procedures for Best Management Practices for a public park.
As I’ve noted, New Orleans City Park should be the green heart of the area. It should be the leader in sustainability and green principles to which we all turn to learn about and witness how humans properly manage the natural spaces our parks represent. After witnessing the construction of the Big Lake project and it’s poor choice in materials, tree selection and placement, and water management strategies–which connect to all these issues–I believe the park is in the hands of people who are reshaping it in ways that reflect the mindset of a bygone and downright ignorant time.
Here’s a letter I sent today to several people involved in the operations and oversight of City Park:
Hello:
I am writing to urge you to act swiftly to prevent further damage to live oaks in the park; and, to add appropriate arborists and local green/sustainable design experts to the paid teams developing and implementing the park’s Master Plan.
Apparently, the overall planner for the Great Lawn project designed it to include concrete structures around the base of the large live oak across from the Peristyle. The design does not take into account the needs of the tree. Damage is happening now, with large areas deep under the canopy dug-out, lined with gravel and framed for concrete. Additionally, there is a trenched square nearly a foot deep under the canopy, cut across the roots.
As a lifelong advocate for live oaks, a recently trained Parkway Partners/Louisiana Urban Forestry Council Certified Citizen Forester; and, having learned Best Management Practices at Jefferson Tree School, a continuing education program for arborists, I know that the top 18 inches of soil are the most critical to the health of live oaks. The photos show the “improvements” underway have removed the top layer of soil and deeply trenched a section, cutting vital roots.
This is clearly a case of destructive design and construction that should have been stopped at several stages of the process.
With the heat, drought and now root damage, this tree will suffer significant die-off from which it will never fully recover. I believe you should immediately bring in a local live oak expert such as Scott Courtright or Tom Campbell to evaluate and try to remediate the damage already done.
It is time for City Park to stop using impermeable hardscapes that suffocate the soil, kill the trees, increase flooding and erosion, and speed pollutants into our precious waterways. No more impermeable concrete or toxic asphalt!
In researching this situation I learned an important fact regarding landscape architects: their degree does not require them to be arborists.
To me, this explains many things regarding how and why trees have been damaged in City Park.
Trees seem to be chosen by the park’s go-to landscape architect with appearance superseding appropriateness. Paving systems are designed and built without an arborist’s understanding of their impact. This is not in line with Best Management Practices for native flora, water management, enhancement of the flyway and wildlife, or Low Impact Design. Any number of people in our area are experts on these matters. Some of them are cc’d in this email.
This is not a job for volunteers. Well paid contractors–using taxpayer funding and donations of people who assume we’re using BMPs–are currently creating these destructive actions. It’s past time to include paid local experts who can help the park become the green leader we all need and deserve.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.
UPDATE Thursday June 25: Zombies live in Legislature: SB75 briefly returned from the dead, attached as amendment to SB104 in manipulative move to revive it. See the story here on the T-P website. It ultimately was stripped from the bill in conference committee and finally died. However, the powers behind the bill evidently were determined and influential. Several politicians risked their reputations, including the lead author, Ed Murray, by pushing this bill. As evidenced by several postings on the T-P comments, Murray’s mayoral aspirations are now greatly weakened by his stance on the Master Plan. The fallout will become evident in the coming months as city election season gets underway in the next few weeks. It should be interesting.
UPDATE: Today (June 24) the House voted against SB75 and the bill is now dead.
So, thanks to sleuthing by “Celebrated blogutante” We Could Be Famous, the powers behind the attempt to mess with the City of New Orleans Master Plan process have come to light. Pres Kabacoff’s company HRI, bought the ad in the Times-Picayune pushing support for SB 75 which seeks to usurp the existing Master Plan process by adding yet another pubic vote. As a supporter of the Master Plan who voted in favor of giving it the force of law, I am disturbed by this effort, apparently driven by developers with ulterior motives, to change the policies and procedures for implementing the long-sought planning process for New Orleans. Red herrings, race baiting and misleading motives by proponents of SB75 make this a particularly ugly situation. My senator, Ed Murray, introduced the bill and my rep, Juan LaFonta supports it. I believe if this bill passes, not only will there be expensive taxpayer funded legal challenges, but the plan may never become law. Having participated in the process and read much of the current draft of the plan, I am saddened by the misdirection and misleading arguments offered by SB75 supporters. Current development “systems” in New Orleans have hurt the city and kept businesses and future-thinking developers away. The new plan will codify strong green/sustainable development guidelines and will help make it easier for everyone to interact with zoning processes. It will ensure that a level playing field is available to all.
The bill is now facing a House vote on Monday. I urge everyone to contact members of the Louisiana House of Representatives and let them know that the people of New Orleans already voted in support of the Master Plan process and that this bill will delay and possibly prevent New Orleans from ever having a Master Plan that helps both businesses and the public have a healthy, well-designed environment in which to do business and live.
Here’s New Orleans City Councilmember Jackie Clarkson’s thoughts on why we must defeat SB 75
This is a rather primitive path in a park out west:
This is what the N.O. City Park Improvement Association, park directors and contracted designers consider a modern path:
Don’t you feel better knowing that people on the public payroll showed their wisdom in the management of one of the world’s great municipal parks by designing, reviewing and approving nearly a mile of polluting, impermeable, heat-inducing asphalt eight feet wide? This really brings New Orleans into the 21st Century! Heck, now you can even drive a car in places you couldn’t before. We sure are in good hands.
I want to thank all the wonderful people around the world who continue to contribute to our renewal. I know you will be impressed when you see how we’ve become such good stewards of our landscape in the aftermath of Katrina. Come to think of it, we might even make a few more bucks showing the world how we do this.
I don’t know about you, but I’m so proud right now I could cry.
I’ve decided on a new career that I know will make me rich. I’m going to be a chicken plucking, film making, sports team owning, wood pulping for export, drug testing entrepreneur! Yes, that’s the key.
Since it’s increasingly obvious the state doesn’t care for its arts, music, environment, mental health or safety, I figured I’d put my thinking cap on and ponder: What does the state really support? And, voila, I got the answer!
We’re spending $114 million buying the friendship of the movie industry, we’re putting up $50 million for a chicken plant near the Arkansas border and $20 million for a chicken freezer next to the French Quarter, we’re annually handing professional sports teams dozens of millions, we’re giving tens of millions to speed up the cutting of our mixed hardwood forests for things like wood pellets to be burned for fuel in Europe and landscape mulch, and we might put our money where the piss is by drug testing 20,000 welfare recipients.
Those are the businesses in Louisiana’s future!
On the other hand, we’re doing nothing to support music, cutting the arts, still don’t fully understand how to restore our environment, are closing and cutting mental health facilities and even have a bill ready for the upcoming session that allows guns on campuses… Hey wait, I just thought of something: bulletproof vests for teachers and students!
Hell, I almost missed a big one that could pay for my second Hummer. Yeah, it’s a great time to be in Louisiana, no foolin’…IF you know what you’re doing.
As I write this, N.O. City Park (NOCP) is laying 4800 linear feet of 8 foot wide impermeable asphalt pathways in its Big Lake construction project. Also, construction crews are demolishing old parking and tennis courts between the Peristyle and Botanical Gardens to install yet more, polluting, impermeable, heat-inducing asphalt.
With all that we know about permeable paving and better stormwater management, this old fashioned, 20th century, car-oriented thinking is mind boggling. And to watch all this happen in one of the most precious places in the world, utilizing money donated from people who surely hoped we’d do the best we could to build with a strong sense of ecological awareness, is an abuse which I can find no diplomatic words to describe. I leave it to you to express, exclaim and accuse. As with so many things in the public realm–and NOCP is a public park whose staff is on the state payroll–we all share some of the blame.
I sent the following letter to Sally Perry, VP of the board of the New Orleans City Park Improvement Association (NOCPIA). I encourage readers to contact the NOCPIA and elected officials and demand that NOCP be the most innovative, sustainable park it can be.
Hi Sally:
So glad to reconnect and also happy that you were at the hearing. I’m not a golfer; but I don’t want to turn City Park into a feral landscape, either. There is a balance. A win-win can be achieved. However, I believe the plans as they now stand reflect outmoded thinking; an almost Eisenhower era-style of planning where development is done the way it always has been with cars and “drainage” as primary considerations.
Regarding NOCP drainage, the question starts with “to where?” And the dominoes of watershed realities expand outward for many, many miles. These realities must be understood and built-into all design considerations for our region, not just NOCP. David Waggoner knows so much about this thanks to his personal mission to interact with and learn from the Dutch. Is he part of the design team?
The current attitude seems to be the old “it’s too expensive” brush-off based on little research. We know so much more about ecological management, watersheds, and how to make design regenerative rather than just durable. What the park team needs is a change of thinking. And impervious asphalt and concrete need to be perceived as counterproductive.
We desperately need sustainability/green leadership to help redesign all plans to maximize innovation. City Park would then become a center for excellence in sustainable park design and implementation, something I believe would not only make the park more economically feasible and attractive to the world; but, something I also believe the world expects us to do with their contributions of time and money. And such a turn of thinking would open many more doors of support from myriad foundations and organizations.
The park has no green leader. It apparently has no strong green connections to the rapidly growing body of local professionals available to research, develop and implement best practices for sustainable, low impact design. And with nobody on the staff or board demanding innovation, how can anyone be expected to innovate?
Imagine if NOCP were to become a world leader in sustainable park design and operations, a true community partner in the education, health and well-being of the region. A place where people gathered not only for peaceful beauty but to learn how to live better, how to grow food, how to implement landscaping principles that healthily interact with the surrounding watershed, how to make a park thrive while maintaining its ecological balance and reducing the negative impact of parking, buildings, recreational facilities and golf courses. Now that would be an economic driver that could lead to sustaining the fiscal future of NOCP!
And sustainable is as much about the green of money as it is the green of the landscape. NOCP could be the best municipal park on the planet.
Mistakes we make now will not be ours to live with, they will be faced by our children and theirs. But, when we kill an ancient oak because we added too much impervious asphalt and concrete, or kill a cypress because we failed to maintain fresh water systems by assuming high saline water from the bayou was good, we commit two crimes: we assault our history and we steal from the future. Adding more heat-inducing, polluting, impermeable asphalt and concrete is a crime against the future. The cost must be measured in more than just today’s dollars.
It’s time to stop and look at what we’re doing. It’s time to make sustainable, low impact design the highest priority of planning.
Look at the makeup of the board and staff. Where is the diversity of thought, age and race that reflects New Orleans? Where are the young innovators who will lead us tomorrow? It will be their park, sooner than you or I want to admit.
I would be thrilled to be of assistance in any and every way possible in helping make NOCP the greenest park on earth. However it will take the leadership of the NOCPIA board to make anything happen. Feel free to call upon me at any time, and to share my thoughts with the rest of the board.
Respectfully yours,
Steve Picou
Additional Links:
Board of Commissioners of N.O. City Park Improvement Assn (a state agency, list needs updating)
OK, so the numbers are in and, as reported today in the Shreveport Times, in 2007 Louisiana invested $100,000,000 in film (after recouping $14m in taxes) on $429,000,000 of film spending. Of course verifying these numbers, particularly the spending by film companies, is a fuzzy math situation in which we remain dependent upon the film companies themselves to report their spending, so I have my doubts as to the accuracy.
Can you imagine that if you were an investor in the film industry, say in a film fund, how much of a long term return your money might be getting? You’d be getting checks for the rest of your life and that of your heirs if you had spent $100 million in a film investment vehicle that spread your investments around the industry. But what does Louisiana get? One time, poorly validated “spending” by these companies that results in short-term jobs averaging $32,000. But we look good on camera!
If this is such a good investment, why don’t we do it for music? In fact, why don’t we do it for every business in Louisiana. If the state can directly spend a dollar and get back four, why not spend on restaurants, grocery stores, construction companies, or any business? Because it defies the laws of physics and economics. You can’t create a perpetual motion machine and you can’t use public money to create perpetual economic engines. For the public to benefit, any expenditure needs to produce more in tax revenues than it spends. Just as too many calories make you fat, too much spending makes you broke. No matter how you extend the numbers to “secondary spending” you cannot ignore the fact that more money is being taken from public coffers than is being replenished.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: where’s Louisiana’s share? If individuals invested this much money in the film business, they’d be getting a a piece of the action, a return on investment. Why is this not possible for public investment?
Music is our true asset. Though we welcome Hollywood and the movie industry, it is not one of Louisiana’s naturally occurring assets. Music is our calling card to the hearts, minds and wallets of the world. Yet we continue to allow it to flounder, leaderless, budget-less and without accountability for what little is being done. The press and public remain silent about the ongoing tragedy that is the Louisiana Music Commission.
Here’s the kind of readily available information that used to be produced by the LMC and which was publicly available on the web until 2006 when the years of undermining by a small, avaricious group empowered by soon-to-be-jailed former Louisiana Economic Development (LED) Entertainment director Mark Smith and other cohorts finally prevailed in destroying the LMC:
Economic Impact of the Louisiana Music Industry Analyzed by City
In fact, let me state this: former LED secretaries Don Hutchinson and Mike Olivier, along with Gov. Kathleen Blanco and the aforementioned Mark Smith were to music what the US Army Corps of Engineers was to flood protection in New Orleans in 2005–a massive disaster with ongoing consequences that will affect future generations.
Of course, I could be wrong. In fact, I hope I am. Someone, please convince me that I’m wrong about all this and that Louisiana is better off because of these things. I’m a reasonable person.
An update Saturday in the T-P regarding the film tax credit scandal is worth reading. Another name added to the list of perpetrators–or in this case purpose-traitors for these folks are traitors to Louisiana. They used, abused and stole from the taxpayers and got caught. And they impacted the state’s creative industry, music in particular, in ways from which it has not recovered.
Ok, that’s all I’m going to say about that.
I sat through the entire Tom Petty documentary, “Runnin Down a Dream” and am very glad I did. An amazing film, an incredible artist. In fact, we watched it again the next day. It’s that good.
I know I’ve recommended this before, but if you’re trying to keep up with tons of information, try Alltop.com and push your capacity for overload. The range of subjects/sources seems to be expanding weekly. Headlines from publications and resources you never knew existed are aggregated under subjects ranging from the traditional news, sports, politics, to specialty areas like nonprofits, green and technology. Be careful, you might get lost.
I’ve been scanning what remains of my collection of Bas Clas memorabilia and music. Of course the fact that the band is now booked to play Friday, Oct 31 at Downtown Alive and Saturday, November 1 at the Blue Moon Saloon in Lafayette is probably to blame for my trips down nostalgia lane. We haven’t played since December 2006, so this is a big deal–at least to a few folks. It’s nice to have something fun on the horizon
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