In general, the City’s lack of maintenance of Mission Trail Nature Preserve, the City’s largest park, has led not only to the lack of implementation of the City’s General Plan/Coastal Land Use Plan and Mission Trail Nature Preserve Master Plan, but to the existence of public health and safety hazards which require proactive actions to ameliorate.
Case in Point: On Flanders Trail, a significant Monterey Pine tree is angled dangerously over the Trail and leaning into two other Monterey Pine trees, as the following photos depict. This represents a potential public health and safety issue and should be addressed by the City expeditiously, as the General Plan/Coastal Land Use Plan Coastal Resource Management Element and the Municipal Code dictate, as follows:
Mission Trail Nature Preserve
P5-155 Remove dead/hazardous trees only as needed. Leave dead trunks in place when not hazardous to provide habitat for woodpeckers and other fauna. (LUP)
Moreover, for public health and safety purposes, the City’s Municipal Code requires the removal of trees.
Four Views of the Monterey Pine tree over Flanders Trail, as follows:
View of Caution Tape around trunk of Monterey Pine tree leaning over Flanders Trail with roots uprooted; Caution Tape placed there by a concerned resident.
View of Monterey Pine tree leaning into other Monterey Pine trees over Flanders Trail.
View of Monterey Pine tree lending into and against two other Monterey Pine trees over Flanders Trail.
View of Monterey Pine tree against another Monterey Pine tree over Flanders Trail.In addition, during the last storm, a dead tree trunk fell over Serra Trail (center); notice the tree is in a grove of trees with their trunks covered with ivy, adversely impacting the health of the trees.
Ivy-Covered Tree Trunk (center) cracked during storm and fell onto Serra Trail.
Section of Fallen Tree Trunk with Embedded Acorns on Serra Trail.
6 comments:
Public health and safety has not been a priority of McCloud administrations. You only need to look at all the trees along city streets and in city parks which are dead, dying, old, or sick and need to be removed before they injure someone, damage property or take out power or telephone lines. Although the funds are available to rectify this problem, they are never allocated. Carmel has also been without senior fire officers for years even though, again, the funds are available to pay the salaries. Instead money is squandered on paying for part time Pacific Grove people to lead the department- led by the PG fire chief, who says he is overworked just taking care of his own city's problems. There are still a dozen fire hydrants in Carmel that don't work and evidently aren't about to be fixed anytime soon. The owners of effected homes are assured that this isn't a problem but how safe are homes that are protected by non-functioning fire hydrants?
Do the City Council and the Mayor think they can get away with ignoring and flouting the LUP forever? It looks like they do. They never seem to learn even when they put the City on the losing end of suits.
It is a disgrace how the city ignores the public safety of people, who live and work here. If nothing else, the city is leaving itself open to lawsuits for negligence which it will find hard to defend. Mayor McCloud and her city councils have already wasted our tax dollars on losing lawsuites and on various other frivilous and self serving things while failing to budget revenue for important and basic needs such as maintenance and public safety. When the City of Carmel has to pay out additional large sums because of neglecting public safety it will mean even more money being siphoned off from areas where it is most needed. Is this misfeasance or malfeasance? In either case Carmel businesses and residents are the losers.
Something for blog readers: This is Carmel logic under Sue McCloud. Sue wants everyone to think she is the leading crusader for banning Styrofoam county-wide. Carmel even has a Styrofoam ban dating from 1989. But, oops, in eight years of being mayor, she hasn’t enforced the ban. Oops, she’s violated the municipal code again. With leadership like this, we should hire a consultant to do the mayor’s job and I am convinced he would do it better than Sue.
MTNP should be maintained like Carmel Beach and Devendorf Park. That the mayor allows poison oak and ivy to grow to knee height, obscuring the ground and climbing trees is something she would not allow along the beach bluff pathway or Devendorf Park. The only solution is a change in leadership-a change from "we can't" to "we can." Enough is enough. Vote the "we can't" incumbents out of office ASAP.
On the bloggers comment about Styrofoam and Sue McCloud: this is the "do as I say, not as I do" saying in action. Tell other cities they should adopt a Styrofoam ban while Carmel under Sue McCloud refuses to enforce the city's ban today.
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