From the Brooklyn Paper:
“City officials fibbed to advance their controversial redesign for a section of Fort Greene Park when they claimed that dozens of meadow trees destined for the hatchet are sick and near-death, because most of the green things are actually young and in prime health, according to… a report from city-hired arborists.
The agency, as part of its “Parks Without Borders Program,” plans to make Fort Greene Park’s entry…into a grand corner entrance… which requires leveling some hilly mounds, …and chopping down trees.
Parks department honchos told locals…that the green things chosen for removal wouldn’t survive for much longer. But the agency’s forestry report — a survey of all 129 trees currently growing where the redesign would occur that Friends of Fort Greene Park received via a Freedom of Information Act request and shared with this newspaper — shows that many of the trees deemed old and ill were anything but, according to Gruen.
Residents’ outcry over the trees getting the axe led some top city officials to question the plan…
“I believe that the city has not done its due process, and that the redesign dulls the environmentally resilient features that the park currently provides, such as mitigating storm water runoff,” Public Advocate Letitia James penned in a Nov. 27 letter to the commission. “The city has not done the proper environmental review.”
