In the wake of a recent chop-down of beloved trees, St. Ronan-Edgehill neighbors and activists called for new city laws to protect their arboreal friends in the future.
Bill Kaplan (at left in photo), the secretary of the St. Ronan-Edgehill Neighborhood Association (RENA), was one of many speakers who bemoaned the recent chopping down by Albertus Magnus College of the line of hemlocks along Prospect and a copse of oaks on Ogden behind Mohun Hall.
Although the Friday afternoon event at Prospect and Ogden Streets was billed as a memorial service, people came to do more than praise and bury the trees.
In the trees’ honor, activists including Alderwoman Alfreda Edwards, land use attorney Marjorie Shansky, and event organizer Anstress Farwell of the Urban Design League called for the forming of a coalition to work on amending the city’s zoning ordinances with respect to trees.
Quoting an African proverb — “When is the best time to plant a tree? 20 years ago. When is the next best time? Now” — Shansky said that New Haven needs to fall in with a national trend of doing far more to protect and enhance the “urban canopy.”
“We need to state this as one of our fundamental values and then incorporate that into our ordinances.”
She said that the city has blown many opportunities to do this.
Chris Ozyck, one of the city’s major tree planters through the Urban Resources Institute, said trees not only do what we all know they do in terms of producing oxygen and shade, but they reduce through their shading the cracking of asphalt and thus saves the city lots of money.
As part of its tree canopy goals, he said New York City has committed to planting one million new trees, and he called for New Haven as a city to make the policy changes necessary to be part of this.
The event featured much criticism of Albertus Magnus College for its poor communication skills in not consulting with neighbors before cutting down trees, even though the trees were on the college property.
“Albertus is a religiously affiliated college with many tax exemptions from us, the public. They may not have a legal obligation, but a moral one, and a Christian one to be a good neighbor,” said neighbor Peter Dobkin Hall, an expert on non-profits.
Albertus did not send a spokesperson to the event, although some Albertus students, sympathetic to the group, were present.
Rosanne Zudekoff, the college’s spokesperson, has previously said the trees were cut down for reasons of safety, arboreal health, and campus beautification and they would be replaced by plantings and tasteful, park-like substitutes.
Ozyck said that while the coalition works on citywide issues of tree ordinance change, he urged neighbors not to yell and scream at Albertus but to talk with them.
Edwards said previous attempts to speak with Jean Mann, the president of the college on the trees and other matters were frustrating.
Farwell, who also linked the importance of trees to their traffic-calming value, said that discussions were already under way with aldermen, in addition to Edwards, who have had tree issues in their area.
These include Dolores Colon in the Hill, whose constituents remain irate about the chopping down of the barrier trees in front of I‑95; and Alderman Moti Sandman in Beaver Hill, where residents mourned as a developer cut down a century-old copper beech.
I fully support new city laws to protect our stately New Haven trees in the future. Thank you, Alfreda Edwards, Marjorie Shansky, Anstress Farwell, Chris Ozyck, Delores Colon, and Moti Sandman for taking the lead and for supporting the St. Ronan-Edgehill neighbors and activists who are in mourning for their newly cut neighborhood trees at Albertus Magnus College. We definitely need to amend the city's zoning ordinances with respect to trees. We are planting new young trees in New Haven all the time. However, we need to respect and protect the mature trees which have graced our neighborhoods for the past 50 to 100 years or more.