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# Who’s out of their tree?
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/whos-out-of-their-tree-editor/
- Published: 2008-03-15T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T18:53:14.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Santa Monica, #archive-import

*By Ted Bonnitt Santa Monica*

Bill Bauer’s column (“Bill’s jabbering slang gets with the times,” page 4, Feb. 25) illustrates the challenge of writing a “witty” column at the expense of logic. Sure Mr. Bauer, the rest of the world is laughing at a group of citizens who are making a generous effort to preserve trees in an urban environment. And get this, they’re doing it at a time when our environment is obviously stressed and temperatures are rising.

If the “rest of the world” did take notice, it might share a chuckle over why the City Council, which prides itself as environmentally progressive, would willfully cut down and uproot over 50 full growth trees over the objections of a substantial group of their constituents.

If the rest of the world looked a little closer, it might really enjoy a laugh over how us “wackos” are being told to accept the disputed claim that so many trees pose a danger to the public that they must be removed, while there is apparently not one dangerous tree anywhere along neighboring Fifth and Sixth streets.

The only laughable part of this dispute is how a majority of councilmembers are ignoring their constituents’ wishes from their ivory tower. And I’ll laugh all the way to the voting booth next time, remembering how 40-plus-year-old trees were sold out by their strained reasoning.

I operate a business on Second Street and Santa Monica Boulevard. The trees provide protection from the heavy soot of idling and passing buses (we wipe black soot off our office table surfaces every day). The trees are beautiful and provide welcome cooling in the summer.

The Daily Press has not done a thorough enough job of reporting this story. How did the tree removal become tied to the overall funding of the improvement project? Has there been any recent polling of businesses and citizens in light of this controversy? And who has independently examined the details of this so-called “improvement” project and how it necessitates the destruction of so many trees? SMDP may better serve their readers by raising serious questions rather than offering editorial opinions, glib columnists and pejorative pop quiz queries like, “How far should the Treesavers go to protect the trees?”

Destroying mature, environmentally productive shade trees with scrawny replacements seems like a shame rather than an improvement to me, especially if it “opens up” Second and Fourth Streets to the same bland retail chain environment that has consumed the Third Street Promenade.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 15, 2008.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/031508.pdf?ref=smdp.com)