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# Santa Monica Planting seeds
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/santa-monica-planting-seeds-editor/
- Published: 2008-04-17T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T19:17:52.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Ocean Park, #archive-import

*By Susan Hartley*

Instead of increasing our urban forest, our City Council and City Staff are intent on de-foresting Santa Monica. They are into sticks rather than trees. Look at Santa Monica Boulevard and Broadway between Ocean and Fifth Street, Pico Boulevard, and 32nd Street between Pearl Street and Ocean Park Boulevard. No Santa Monica tree is safe from this misguided bait and switch.

City Manager Lamont Ewell, Walt Warriner and the City Council (except for Kevin McKeown) try to justify the squandering of $600,000 of taxpayer dollars to destroy and transplant healthy, thriving ficus trees on Second and Fourth streets on the ground that they will be replaced with 120 gingko biloba trees. That’s analogous to justifying the killing of elephants because you are replacing them with mice.

The 23 ficus trees now on death row did not all of a sudden simultaneously become structurally unstable. Independent arborists and even the city’s expert disagree with the city’s latest rationalization.

The ficus trees have at least another 100 years to live. Besides being beautiful, their mature canopies are crucial environmentally, e.g., heat island effect, absorption of carbon monoxide and photosynthesis.

Gingko biloba trees have small, slow growing canopies. They are deciduous. They are sticks at least five months out of the year, meaning a hotter area, no shade, no stormwater runoff retention, no carbon monoxide absorption, no photosynthesis. We need to retain our mature ficus canopy.

City Council can spend the $600,000 to buy new trees to plant throughout Santa Monica. Our Urban Deforester can plant his gingko trees in front of City Hall. They can be a living monument, albeit leafless almost half the year, to City Hall follies. If City Hall persists on its short-sighted course, this Katz, Holbrook, Shriver, Genser, Bloom, O’Connor, Ewell, Warriner Gingko Grove can be a reminder of the City Hall that was.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 17, 2008.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/041708.pdf?ref=smdp.com)