Did I just read John Pietig’s guest column correctly…we spent $18,000 for a team of arborists to verify that four 50- to 80-foot-tall eucalyptus trees should be replaced? This is crazy. Why do we keep wasting our money on “professional consultants” to tell us what we already know? I am by no stretch an arborist, but I’m fairly confident that I don’t need one to tell me that an 80-foot-tall eucalyptus with a gaping hole in the trunk is a public danger. Eucalyptus are a destructive, non-native, fire hazard with the potential to be lethal. Let’s get them all replaced, without the cost of multiple consultants, immediately before something tragic happens.
All sense of logic seems to have vacated City Hall. Next thing you know someone will want to spend $90,000 on consultants so they can tell us that it doesn’t make any sense to restore a useless, broken down sewage digester building. Oh wait…
Mark Weeks, Laguna Beach
