Removal will take place during Spring break; participant at information meeting “very angry” about tree cutting during a nesting season
(By News Desk)
Officials of School District 46 (SD46) explained on Wednesday why and how 33 mature trees will be removed from the grounds of Gibsons Elementary School during Spring break, between March 12 and 27.
The public information meeting was by Zoom. The participants were not given an opportunity to speak but could submit written questions. The questions were not visible to the audience; principal Lynda Brisebois chose which questions were to be answered. After a powerpoint presentation about the tree removal, there was no time to answer all 33 questions.
Nicholas Weswick, secretary-treasurer at SD46, arborist Bill Lasuta, the consultant for the project, Rob Collison, manager of facilities and transportation for SD46, and principal Brisebois gave the impression that the tree removal will definitely happen.
“We’ve gone door to door, advertised in the Coast Reporter, mailed people, put up signs, it has come up at the Town of Gibsons, we’re holding this public meeting, we talked about it in budget discussions, we talked with the Skwxwu7mesh Nation” said Collison. “We’ve done everything right. The Town will give us the permits.”
At Tuesday’s Council meeting, mayor Bill Beamish said the Town has not issued permits for this project. “We asked the SD to provide us with results of their consultation [process] before permits [are] considered,” he told The Coast Clarion in an email.
The School District has not posted a recording of Wednesday’s public meeting on its website. It is unclear who they spoke with at the Skwxwu7mesh Nation.
In March last year, SD46 had eight trees cut down behind the school, citing hazardous conditions. The removal created a public outcry after several people claimed most stumps looked perfectly healthy.
Arborist Lasuta has determined that another 33 mature trees are in the high risk category.
“We are doing this [removing the trees] for only one reason: safety,” Weswick said last night.
Lasuta has identified 58 danger trees on the property; 25 are deemed low or medium risk. These will be re-assessed in one to three years but Lasuta thinks they will have to come down, too. “Once these trees are isolated, they become high risk in wind or a major storm event,” he said.
There are about 200 mature trees on the property. Most of them are red cedars. “They have shallow root systems and suffer from global warming,” Lasuta said. “You see them dying all over, not just behind the school. These trees are stressed, become susceptible to carpenter ants and termites, and then they become a major risk in storms.
“Safety is paramount in this area,” he said. “The trails the children walk on are one of two metres from some of these trees, people’s homes are close by. The risk of death or injury is real.”
SD46 says it will plant ten trees for every tree removed. Most of them will be saplings of Douglas fir which can withstand drought better than cedar. The District is willing to consider some yearlings of other species to create more diversity.
The students will plant the trees to learn more about nature, the environment, the health of trees and the First People’s concept of interconnectedness. Lasuta said he would take them on a tour to explain the reasons behind the removal.
“It is really nice that over the years, the students will see trees they planted themselves grow into maturity,” principal Lynda Brisebois said.
The cost of the removal will be offset by the sale of the lumber, Weswick said. A surplus is possible. “But that’s not the motivation. It’s all about safety.”
Gibsons Tree Services will carry out the removal. The trees with the blue dots will come down.
Manfred Scholermann, who attended the Zoom meeting, said afterwards he was very angry. “What are they thinking, cutting trees in nesting season? What is the hurry, can’t they wait until the end of August? That will also allow time to ask an expert from Vancouver for a second opinion.”
Scholermann ran an eco-tour company for 25 years. He based his work on the findings of Suzanne Simard, a Canadian scientist who is a professor in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at UBC. Simard conducted ground-breaking research on how trees communicate with each other and exchange carbon, water and nutrients with their own offspring and with other organisms. Jake Gyllenhaal is producing a film about her work.
“What these people at the School District, and the arborist, don’t seem to understand is how soil compaction kills trees,” Scholermann said. “The soil here on the West Coast is extremely thin. Why do you think there are fences along the trails in places like Lighthouse Park in Vancouver? If they had those behind Gibsons Elementary where hundreds of kids run around, any trees in poor health would recover.”
“Fences would not be nice in that area,” Brisebois said when the subject was brought up during the meeting.
Most of the 33 questions were critical of the tree removal. “This is a wildlife corridor. Has a wildlife specialist or an environmentalist been consulted?” one participant asked in writing.
“The fact that we are replanting so many trees shows that we understand the benefits of trees,” Weswick replied.
This smells fishy. A meeting with no discussion allowed? Questions unseen by other participants? Answers given, or not, at the whim of the chair? Claims made with no validity? Has the school board sought a second opinion? Are there mitigation measures that can be applied to keep the trees healthy? Maybe instead of watching the trees grow (are kids in school 50-odd years or so these days?), they can learn how to keep and make them healthy now. And the board is going to cut trees down during nesting season! In an era when birds are dying by the millions? Surely that’s against some kind of law. Maybe the school board needs to go back to school and learn a few things about nature. I think the board needs to slow down on this one, and if they aren’t planning to, I hope town council puts the brakes on. Sheesh.
This is administration overreach. It will be interesting to find out what becomes of the logs after they are
“harvested”.
Participants of the Zoom conference were not allowed to speak, or even made aware of the questions asked by their fellow participants.
A participant claimed the previous cutting resulted in trees dropped even though they were healthy. Did the school board hire the same arborist for the second cutting?
And why cut during nesting season. What do the children learn from that?
I don’t know if this is valid for some of the trees — a friend of mine had a big tree fall, right in front of her, no wind or anything, once when she cut across a lawn in Stanley Park — but it does seem like an excessive number of trees have been condemned on the Gibsons Elementary grounds. I’ve been walking through that trail since I moved here 37 years ago and it is lovely. There is one mature big leaf maple that I hope stays. I go out of my way on my shopping trips to the mall just to experience that scrap of nature. I always sit to rest on the stump where I used to sit with George, my late sweetheart, who had to stop often because of knee problems, so I hope they won’t take this opportunity to get rid of the old stumps too. Dog-walkers use the G.E.S. trail all the time.
I seem to remember hearing that the beautiful grove of evergreens on the School Road side of the Gibsons Legion property is also doomed. I hope not — but I was wondering if that is why Mr. Jacobs’s memorial bench has been removed from there (he was one of my son’s favourite teachers). I liked sitting on that bench to look at the view.
I’m still choked about the maples at the corner of Orange Road and the Highway that were recently butchered. My children and I lived on Orange Road when I first came to the Sunshine Coast. My six-year-old daughter thought the road was named after the trees because they turned such a beautiful orange in the fall.
I am an experienced professional and wildlife danger tree assessor.
Just because the trees had a rough year or two doesn’t mean they need to be logged.
I hope the Town will take a long hard look at the procedures followed.
The Zoom meeting was undemocratic. I’ve never attended a Zoom meeting where the participants had no opportunity to speak.
Let’s take a closer look at some elements of the public consultation process.
“We’ve gone door to door”. Where exactly did they go door to door?
“We’ve mailed people”. Email? Canada Post? How did they select the people who were mailed? How did they get their contact information?
“It has come up at the Town of Gibsons”. In what way? A lot of things come up at the Town of Gibsons I guess.
“We’re holding this public meeting”. The way it was set up, people were simply told.
“We talked about it in budget discussions”. Of course. What members of the public were involved in the budget discussions of the School Board?
“We talked with the Skwxwu7mesh Nation”. Who did you speak with? When? What was said?
The arguments of the School District to cut these trees do not ring true.
I never got anything in the mail, or had anyone come to my door about this.