City Council Votes To Take Out 65 Trees at New City Center

Wait.  Did Alpharetta City Council just approve a change in the tree save plan for Alpharetta's new "new" City Center plan?  Did City Council just decide to take out 65 trees in the new "new" City Center plan and only leave 15 trees - a change from the original plan?  Did this get any ahead of time mention before last Monday's Council meeting? You mean to tell me those beautiful old oaks and other trees will be chopped down?  

If this is true - and I'm waiting for someone to tell me this isn't true - then what is it about trees that this Council seems to hate so much? Why is our City Council anti-tree?  Or, should I ask, is this relatively young City Council all about rushing into new development at any price - even if it has no regard for our ordinances, plain common sense and tasteful aesthetics?    

There is a great blog on the Next American City website called "Planting Trees Is Like Not Eating a Marshmallow".  The point the writer is trying to make is that, unlike beautiful buildings or sculpture or hardscape features that can look stunningly beautiful when new, trees are an exception to the "new" rule.  They actually are more beautiful when they are mature.  And hey - guess what - you cannot plant a mature tree.  All those trees that they will be planting at the new "new" City Center, I don't care if they are maples or common crape myrtles - they will be young and transplantable, probably ordinary, servicable, plain- not mature and majestic.  To sacrifice the mature, majestic trees that are already in place and that have been hard at work establishing themselves for decades now, is to waste money and beauty and throw ridicule at the effort of time.   It is folly, wasteful, arrogant.  

You simply cannot replace the inexpressible something of a mature and majestic tree that has been hard at work growing for 50-80 years with a puny stick from a local nursery.  It's not the same thing.  And it shows great disrespect for history.