Earlier this week, anti-deep-bore-tunnel activist Elizabeth Campbell sent out a furious email to the Seattle City Council (and the rest of her extensive list) decrying the city’s Department of Transportation for marking about 40 street trees along the route of the Mercer Corridor project, part of the overall tunnel construction project, for destruction.
“[H]ere we go again, subjected to the rank hypocrisy of the City of Seattle,” Campbell wrote. “Almost down to the AGC building all the trees that are planted both along the Lake Union water edge and along Westlake Avenue are to be torn out. Is that anyone’s idea of sustainable or green practices?”
As it turns out, it’s worse than Campbell thinks. According to SDOT spokesman Rick Sheridan, the city plans to remove about 140 trees for the Mercer project, many of them directly in the right-of-way that will become the new two-way Mercer and Valley Streets. The rest, Sheridan says, are “immediately adjacent to construction” and could endanger Mercer construction crews.
Sheridan says SDOT will replace all those trees on a two-to-one basis, meaning they’ll plant 280 new trees. However, he didn’t know how many of the trees SDOT is removing are mature trees, and SDOT isn’t using anything like the “tree credit” formula the city’s Department of Planning and Development plans to use to limit tree cutting for residential developments, which could result in the removal of fewer trees (or their replacement with larger trees).
Instead, he says, SDOT will choose species that “preserve the tree canopy in a way that’s appropriate for an urban area” like South Lake Union; additionally, he says, SDOT plans to plant around 10,000 shrubs and build a rain garden.
