Tree Butchers and Billboards

Trucks slide to a stop near a leafy city-owned tree. A band of bandit trimmers, arboreal butchers really, tumbles out and in the quiet of dawn starts chain-sawing away. In nine minutes the cutters are gone. The tree they left behind didn’t get a trim, it got a flattop. Nearly all the leaves are gone and the upper branches are lopped off, leaving the plant at risk for disease.

It’s bad enough that billboard companies are scouring the region for the few street corners left to clutter and the last remaining city vistas to obliterate. Bad enough that these firms have already put up an estimated 4,000 bootleg billboards in Los Angeles alone--wholly illegal or illegally enlarged--and city officials don’t have the money or backbone to pull them down. Now, apparently, someone wants to force us to look at the gigantic ads by hacking away at the trees in front of them. It’s OK, they must think, to destroy taxpayer property to make their signs visually unavoidable, so they can keep raking in up to $70,000 per month per sign. Yes, billboard executives deny doing it, but who else has any reason to keep the billboards in clear sight?

In West Hollywood, the vigilante tree trimming in front of billboards has gotten so bad that officials are offering a reward for information leading to the arrest of these bandits. Some 20 trees along Sunset Boulevard, all in front of billboards, were shorn last month, up from 10 in April.

Like Los Angeles, West Hollywood allows residents or business owners to pay private contractors to trim city-owned trees if city crews aren’t available. Residents need a permit, and as a safeguard they must ensure that the trees are pruned to national arborist standards.

Not just the bandit tree butchers but those who hire them should be held responsible. If it is billboard executives, perhaps some of the same ones who contribute so generously to the campaigns of Los Angeles officials, they should be forced to help fund the planting of trees. The TreePeople, which last year planted more than 1,000 trees with community help in local schoolyards and parks and along city streets, would no doubt be thrilled with a sizable, no-strings contribution. How does $70,000 per hacked-up tree sound?