It won’t bring back the 17 trees that were cut down in Occidental Park last year, but a judge ruled this week that the city broke the law by cutting them down without doing an environmental study.
In a ruling issued Monday, Superior Court Judge John Erlick ordered the city to conduct an environmental study on the health of the park’s remaining 43 London Plane trees, noting that the Pioneer Square activists who sued the city were right: In a controversial remodel last March, the Parks Department replaced the park’s old cobblestones with impervious pavers that could starve the trees of water.
The judge also said the Parks Department had no right to remove the park’s glass-topped pergola because it did not have a structure approved at the time to go in its place – a requirement under laws that govern the Pioneer Square Historic District.
In June of 2005, a group of Pioneer Square residents and business owners led by Bif Brigman and Elle Tracy sued the Parks Department to stop the remodel, saying that the destruction of 17 trees and the park’s European-style design were never part of a neighborhood plan that they helped draw up. Before the demolition, the group presented the City Council with a petition of 1,400 people opposed to the Parks Department remodel, then argued the matter before a city hearing examiner, who ruled against them.
Judge Erlick’s ruling, however, states that the hearing examiner overstepped her bounds. The Pioneer Square Preservation Board had final say over the project, but at the time it voted approval in May 2005, the judge ruled, the city had not presented the board with an environmental checklist required by law. The city later issued a Declaration of Non-Significance that the board never saw, preventing any public input on the environmental issues.
“No private developer would get away with what the city did,” Tracy says. Though 17 of the London Plane trees are gone, “Saving the park’s remaining 40-year-old trees is what we’re fighting for now.”
—Cydney Gillis