Tree Warden Alan Snow preparing to plant
Actually more like ten trees will be growing soon all along Blue Hills Road, as about a dozen neighbors, tree warden Alan Snow and Town Manager John Musante showed up this morning for a good old fashioned tree planting.
Princeton Elm (resistant to Dutch Elm disease) will grace the Schmidt family front yard
Coordinated by Amherst Shade Tree Committee member Nancy Higgins, the neighborhood won out in a contest with two other streets for the planting services. Last year Town Meeting approved spending $612,000 to purchase 2,000 trees for municipal tree canopy enhancement.
Somewhere in the distance, the Lorax smiled.
Town Manager John Musante center Nancy Higgins Tree Committee rtght
This will help the town hide the potholes with shade. More tax money well spent.
ReplyDelete$600,000.00 spent on trees, a bloated school budget, and we are still failing the low income and minority students. When will the people of Amherst wake up and stop doing feel good work and actually do thing that really makes long term sustainable change for the people they claim they want to help.
ReplyDeleteI bet the people who wanted more money for human services could have found a better use for 600K.
ReplyDeleteI think it's a "quality of life" investment.
ReplyDeleteAnd I could find a few other places to cut if you're worried about human services.
Last year LSSE recreation department lost over $300,000 just like the year before. So there's your $600K right there.
And that does not include the $40,000 per year lost at the Cherry Hill Golf course.
The tree money is being spent over three years, and at the rate they're going, maybe four or five years.
Cut LSSE. Things worked much better when you went to town hall to buy pool passes, and took classes directly from the businesses giving them.
ReplyDeleteLSSE serves a very small portion of this town. I'd rather see that cost per person going to AFD and APD.
And selling the Golf Course would provide a decent chunk of change to finance the new, badly needed South Fire Station.
ReplyDeleteWe have a completely overwhelmed emergency system! We are frequently without fire and medical coverage and not just on Friday nights! They wont increase the fire dept. size, so its very nice to know we have over 600k to spend on panting trees. Unreal!
ReplyDeletewhat a shame, I am all for keeping things in good shape but how about using resources in a responsible manner for once.
ReplyDeleteWelcome to Amherst where they can spell the word priorities, tell you its meaning, tell you how to use it in a sentence, but they have no idea how to apply the word in the real world. Let's keep up appearances. That will do a lot.
ReplyDeleteHave Snark, Will Comment
ReplyDeleteWill the shade tree committee (and town manager) come back to help with raking, pruning and brush removal for the life of the trees?
ReplyDeleteHa, good one. After that big October storm I had several neighbors that had to fight to get the tree debris removed. A couple even got billed!
ReplyDeleteLarry, I took photos of the Blue Hills Rd. tree planting. (Matter of fact, I appear in one of yours!)
ReplyDeleteIf I could attach a few here, I would. Many of my photos show stumps of bygone trees. There are at least a dozen of these big stumps just on this one street alone. So, in my humble opinion, a large capital improvement project such as this, with significant volunteer labor, which replaces missing trees, and which has the added benefit of bringing neighbors and their children together for a Saturday work project that will significantly add to the beauty and value of the town, is worth doing.
Hey Tom,
ReplyDeleteSend me a few (amherstac@aol.com) and insert them into the story. Great thing about using the web as a publishing platform.