Three cars. Two apartments. Three years. Upwards of five trees. Westwood has become a battleground between residents and their trees.
The latest victims Monday were a pickup truck and station wagon when yet another tree rained down on the Kelton Avenue residential area.
The destruction was nothing out of the ordinary, however. In September, a split tree branch blocked the same street and crushed a pickup truck. In February 2017, a fallen tree went so far as to crash through an apartment building – leaving several tenants without a home, but fortunately not injuring anyone.
As trivial as it sounds, the falling trees have got to stop. Buildings and cars aren’t the only things affected by Westwood’s falling trees: residents’ safety is, too.
The City of Los Angeles can’t sit by amid Westwood’s arboreal carnage. It needs to create a more intuitive and proactive system for monitoring and managing its trees, whether that means dedicating more resources to the Department of Public Works or transitioning some of its responsibilities into the hands of private stakeholders.
The city asserts the importance of maintaining street trees for the sake of their physical, social, economic and aesthetic environment in its urban forestry policy. And that’s true: Despite the damage the trees on Kelton have unleashed upon the street’s inhabitants, they provide shade and greenery often lost in the city.
The same policy resolves that the city’s public works will utilize “state-of-the-art standards for planting, pruning, management and removal of trees.” It’s hard to see these policies being enacted, however, especially in Westwood where trees not only threaten life and property, but make sidewalks difficult to walk on at best and inaccessible at worst.
Part of this may be because it is unclear whose responsibility regular street tree management is. Legally speaking, it is not the city’s, but the property owner’s job to maintain trees on the sidewalks lining their land.
Yet, the city’s urban forestry division has historically taken responsibility for pruning trees and continues that duty today, albeit at a snail’s pace. The city has an online tracking system to track and respond to residents’ inquiries about trimming trees in property overseen by the county’s public works department within two days. Property owners looking to get their trees cut immediately, however, must take initiative and trim their own greenery, but only if armed with a permit to do so.
Trimming trees alone stinks of bureaucracy. But the process to remove a tree is an even bigger thorn in the side. The application takes 90 to 120 days to process and does not specify what fees are attached, just that the applicant is responsible for fees if the request is approved. The city, in its quest to share as much governance as possible, even has public hearing sessions regarding cutting problematic trees. These sessions are listed in a city-managed tree removal notification system.
Involving the community is certainly noble, but when trees are falling down left and right under the burden of their own weight, we have to ask whether residents need more public hearings or proactive city means to tend to problematic greenery.
The trees of Westwood will continue to grow untenably so long as property owners and city officials ignore them. Los Angeles no doubt needs to respect mother nature, but it’s hard to do that when your car is sitting under hundreds of pounds of bark and leaves.