That leafy green approach to the Sonoma Plaza up the final block of Broadway may look idyllic this time of year, but it’s fraught with controversy, expense and even injury.
The Sonoma City Council got an earful of all of the above the Monday before Arbor Day as it considered possible action on the removal and replanting of the Broadway Street trees, at the request of the city Tree Committee.
A subset of the Community Services and Environment Commission, the nine-member Tree Committee met several times in the past few months to consider requests from Broadway property owners to remove one or more of the trees from Broadway. Their complaints: the trees’ growing roots are infiltrating sewer lines and uplifting sidewalks, people are tripping and suing, and the landowners are being stuck with the repair bill.
About six months ago, the owner of the building at 561 Broadway, Jack Monroe, asked for permission to remove two trees in front of the business there, Century 21. He had earlier been given notice from the city requiring him to repair the damaged sidewalk, damage he maintained was caused by the red oak trees.
In January 2015, the owner of the building at 525-527 Broadway, John Powers, also filed for removal of a tree, this one in front of Top That Frozen Yogurt.
But it was the December 2014 request from Melissa Detert Redmond, owner of several buildings along the east side of the avenue, to remove all 17 trees from 520-578 Broadway that pushed the issue onto the desk of Public Works Director Dan Takasugi, and from there onto the City Council agenda.
The story of how 40 red oaks came to line Broadway is both an inspiration and a cautionary tale. According to Larry Barnett’s slide show presentation to the City Council, prior to 1990 that final block of Broadway was anything but hospitable to foot traffic, or business. “It was a hot, barren streetscape,” he said, “a wasteland.”
Powers’ memories are somewhat different. “It was perfect,” he said. “There was nothing wrong with it. In fact, what we should have done was put in diagonal parking, then we would have had more parking and nobody would have complained.”
In 1988 a citizens group presented a “Broadway/City Hall Forecourt Study,’ recommending a comprehensive design treatment from MacArthur up to and including City Hall. The council at the time endorsed the idea, but in 1991 cancelled it when funding was unavailable.
The Sonoma Plaza Foundation, which had been created to help raise money for the Plaza, changed its focus, according to founder Suzanne Brangham. The owner of MacArthur Place led three charity Red and White Balls, sold naming rights of 40 trees to individual donors, and added her own contribution to come up with the $300,000 to redesign the street and plant the trees. The names of those 40 “generous citizens of Sonoma,” as Brangham still calls them, can be found on a plaque on the Union Bank building on the northeast corner of Broadway, across from the Plaza.
Somewhere between the initial streetscape plan and the planting, the trees changed – from the first recommendation of sycamores, to a later iteration of ginko bilobas, then to pin oaks, and finally to the 40 red oaks that arborist James MacNair remembers planting in 1999.
“I’m not sure why it was changed,” he said recently. “It may have been strictly availability. Ginkos in that time period were often very hard to get.” Ginkos are sometimes called “autumn gold,” for their eruption into yellow foilage at summer’s end – which leaves a golden carpet when they fall.
Brangham recalls lobbying for pin oaks, and isn’t sure why red oaks were planted. “My understanding is that we were to get a tree that was deep rooted, that didn’t have surface roots,” she said. “And that’s why I thought the pin oaks were decided upon, because viewing the older trees at the Sonoma Developmental Center, they didn’t disrupt sidewalks.”
“No good deed goes unpunished,” said Catherine Sevenau, manager of the Century 21 brokerage at 561 Broadway. Even though she and other business people appreciate the evenly-spaced, stately trees that now help define historic Sonoma, they are adamant that they should not bear the financial burden for maintaining the sidewalk, or the damaged sewer laterals, or even removal of the trees themselves.
But those expenses are undoubtedly their legal responsibility, according to Takasugi, an obligation that is rooted not only in municipal code but state law. That includes not only the sewer lateral clean-out and the tree itself, but the sidewalk and any personal damages from a trip hazard, “no matter who planted the tree,” said Takasugi.
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