St. Augustine Record Right On on Weak County Laws and Enforcement on Tree-Killing, and Last Saturday's Promiscuous Corporate Tree-Killing Orgy at US 1 Bookstore by Barnes & Noble, Retail Strategies, LLC, Sleiman Enterprises -- St. Augustine Record Editorial, "County's bark much worse than its bite."

Posted: January 31, 2014 - 12:19am
There’s been a buzz over the past week over the disappearance of some trees from the parking lot of the local Barnes & Noble bookstore. On Friday, they were there. On Monday, they were gone.
Sometime in between a tree-trimming service cut down all of the mature live oak trees shading the parking lot, ground down the stumps and were gone.
One resident called local arborist Chuck Lippi after witnessing some of the carnage. Lippi went by later to take a look, but there was nothing left to look at.
“When you see a tree service taking down trees on the weekend,” he told The Record, “you can bet something’s up.”
Apparently, it was.
The county has lots of laws regarding tree removal, but there’s one thing most all of them have in common, at least when dealing with residential or commercial property. You have to have a permit. Barnes & Noble did not.
The county’s environmental supervisor, Ryan Mauch, met with a representative of Retail Strategies LLC on Thursday. It is the management company that oversees the property, which includes the bookstore and the Chili’s restaurant next door: about 4.2 acres in all valued at just over $2.2 million on the tax appraiser’s books.
It is connected to Sleiman Enterprises, a large Jacksonville-based real estate development firm, probably best known for the Jacksonville Landing.
The Record was told by telephone that the representative who met with Mauch was unavailable for comment following the meeting Thursday.
So we don’t know why mature shade trees with 15-inch diameter trunks would be removed from a parking lot.
The county codes include “Remedies for Protected Tree Removal without a permit.” It reads, in part, that they are to be “replaced with like trees of the same size, species and location.” It continues that if replacement is not practical, “an equal number of inches of the same species shall be applied to the trees.”
Here’s how that translates in real terms. Follow closely.
It was determined that the property owners couldn’t replace the trees. Those 15-inch trunks are tough to plant. Aerial photos showed that six trees went missing. Six trees times 15 inches equals 90 inches of mitigation due.
So the owners agreed to plant 10 2-inch trees. That’s 20 inches down, 70 to go. The owners say they can’t plant any more trees on the property, so they’re going to pay the county’s tree bank fund for the other 70 inches. The cost of that is $25 an inch — for a total fine of $1,750.
We’re not tree experts. And how does one put a value on a tree? It does seem that willful destruction by a property management group whose job it is to know the rules for planting and removing trees might carry a little more punitive bite.
Land development laws do change. Should ours? We’re just asking ...
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Clara Waldhari 01/31/14 - 09:04 am 30We witnessed the tree massacre and notified The Record. It was Saturday.
They made very quick work of it. Suddenly the store front could be seen clearly from US 1. Coincidental?
We have the laws. We don't have enforcement of them on weekends, which is why, at least IMO, the B&N Oak Massacre occurred when it did.
Now, the penalties associated with that law? YES, change them and give them teeth like the equipment used to slaughter healthy trees. Make the penalty fit the crime, not with replacement of trees alone, but with very stiff fines.
It's kinda like when developers leveled the historic Casa Cola in the county: "Ooops. We demolished the wrong building. Sorry." There is no going back.
Personally, I intend to BOYCOTT BARNES & NOBLE over this sneaky and wicked plot.
The $1,750 fine won't hurt the corporation at all, but maybe a nice, healthy boycott will speak to them.