ellen shea's buck acknowledge knowledge the value of ellen shea's work and agrees that a level two track assessment would be more thorough. so i suggest that this board consider requiring a level two track assessment. so as to evaluate thoroughly the safety of each of these trees. this might spare more of them, or at least reassure the board and the residents of the square as well as the neighbors that any of those hazards would be removed and further suggest that trimming of weak branches that has been suggested for many of the trees would help alleviate the fears of branches falling on the walkthrough, chris buck used a wooden mallet to sound out the trees for hollowness and used one of those metal pull out tape measures to stick into holes to show how deep were any holes in the trunks of the trees. thus we were called upon to use our own eyes and ears to get how diseased or just defective each tree was. thank you. that's time . thank you. i don't see any questions at this time. yes, commissioner trevino? yeah thank you for. for your testimony. i have a, i think a short question for you. you were describing your walk through the with mr. buck and seeing the hearing, the hearing, the hollowness of the tree and seeing the trees up close. we didn't have those pictures before this hearing prior to at the earlier hearing. and i'm wondering what impact if any, having that walk through has on you or your your concern about the safety. you're you're on mute. we can't hear you. no, i don't think she's on mute. i think you were just getting ready to talk. i don't know. no, i see she's on mute. she just unmuted herself. sorry okay. sorry. please go ahead, miss bowler. yeah uh. i didn't. i didn't need to change my impression because the five trees have been agreed upon to remain on, and the others to be removed. uh i would like it. were more trees to remain than that, if possible, and thought that the. the evaluation, the track evaluation might straight might clarify and help some more of the trees to stay. thank you. okay thank you. we will now hear from saint francis square cooperative. welcome. you have. seven minutes. good evening. all late night tonight, huh? you guys work really hard. thank you for all that you're doing. so my name is connie ford, and i'm on the board representing saint francis square. um, i want to briefly state what i was going to say and then we can start to address miss bowler's comments as this. these trees that we're talking about are on private property. de saint francis square is the manager, the property manager of these trees management of these trees we take very seriously. we it not only includes the health of the tree, which is vital and important, but it also includes the safety of our residents and our neighbors as well as the liability of events that might be caused was because of the trees. our neighbors do include the preschool across the street with little children, the skilled nursing home, rosa parks school. we're all of the kids, not all. many of the kids walk down on ellis underneath the trees and go to school riding their bikes, sometimes with their parents. and on the way home you can see that in the letter that's attached to the packet. at the very last letter is from the principal of rosa parks. and she was so interest rooted in our opinions on this, which we discussed at and that she wrote a very lovely letter really in favor of the work that we've done. our relationship with each other and recommend mending that she agreed with our position. so since the nine six hearing, we have tried desperately to make sure that we've covered all of the points that were risen by all of you. all of them are concerns of ours as we respect this process. we wrote and filed our brief in a timely manner. it contained the letter that we tried to get in at the last hearing inappropriately, but it's there now. we gathered signatures, as you've heard from miss bowler, about about from residents and neighbors and these three entities that i was just talking about it, they come from all of them that was one of the people who had to leave to take care of her young children. but she was a parent who lives in the square and also her to her one son and her future son will be going there later. and they all support it. we have pages and pages representing their thoughts that they're they're scared these so we're supporting that then to this let's see this. we've publicized these this hearing tonight every week in our newsletter, we wrote a front page article, a, about the information of this hearing. when it was how to be here, how to voice your opinion. it was expressed to everybody, everybody in san francisco is pretty clear that we're here representing them tonight. um the last thing that we did is we did reach out to miss bowler. we reached out to miss bowler, and she we agreed and we went we went over to her apartment, not her apartment, but her her apartment building and met with her on sunday afternoon for a couple of hours. and then yesterday we invited her along with chris, to come out and visit the trees, the site themselves and all of those were. and then chris diligently took the time to look at each and every one of the trees and analyze them, showing some of the things something new that he found or that we found is that there's actually a bacteria now, at least in one tree, that you could tell because there's little mushrooms there. i think they call them shoestring mushrooms. and anyway, that that bacteria actually targets the roots and weakens the tree even more. three arborists have said to us that these trees are unsafe and should be removed. both the two that the square hired and the arborists that represent you in the city, they said there was poor structure, rot and decay present. all are planted too close together for at least two of the decaying pockets have debris pockets that are some of them six, eight, ten and one is even three feet long. these are the stabilizing trunks that are becoming unstabilized. the last thing i want. well, i already told you about the japanese. i'm sorry. the bilingual program in in rosa parks and the attention that the principal's giving this issue. so we urge you to deny this appeal and let us go back to our business. the one thing i wanted to say is that we in our meetings with the appellant, we agree to basically on one thing, and that is to remove or remove or drop the street tree on laguna in terms of our permit. so we both agreed to do that. but that's all we agreed on so far. and we really urge you to deny this appeal and let us go back to doing the work of keeping our neighborhood and friends safe and replacing the trees when we can. yeah, i'll just quickly add one of the things i was going to say is that because it was mentioned at the last meeting that we show community support, we did a petition, not digital, we did handwritten one and we obtained over 125 six signatures. and the people who supported public works bureau of urban forestry approval to remove the ten poplar trees where members from our housing co-op, rosa park elementary school families, staff and teachers and the members of japantown, such as members of a church, the neighborhood organizations such as the members of the japantown task force and workers who work in the neighborhood, and the phoebe hearst school family teachers and staff and as mentioned, we've been in discussion with the rosa parks parent advisory committee about having more cherry trees planted because their grove, where they've planted reached capacity and so we'll work to set up a memorandum of agreement to work out arrangements for that for the japanese bilingual program they have and lastly, we and many others are hopeful that you'll deny the appeal and allow us to replace the disease and dying trees with healthy trees that will thrive for decades. thank you. i have we see. i see a question from commissioner lundberg for you. thank you very much. it's obviously you've put a lot of work into this. and we on this panel certainly appreciate it. i'm remembering what mr. buck submitted in his papers and i'll ask him the same question later. but of the ten trees that are slated for removal under this permit, it did occur to me that that. of the ten, it sounded like a. five could be replaced rather than the four that was in your previous plan is that in accordance with what? with what your understanding is as well? well, we have been talking about that. and so, yes, we accept the five replacement now. we upped it for one, trying to compress lies with the appellant, which hasn't happened yet. okay so just so i'm clear, the saint francis square is willing to do five replacement as opposed to four, which was previously allowed in the permit. okay in this space where the ten are in the space where the ten are being removed, correct. okay. plus the cherry trees. thank you. okay okay. thank you. i don't see any further questions. we'll now hear from the department evening commissioners , chris buck with san francisco public works, bureau of urban forestry. i'm just going to pull up a powerpoint. good evening. thanks again for the opportunity to return. it didn't go well several weeks ago and i won't repeat a lot of what's been covered already. but i did make a point prior to connect ing with the appellant d.o.j. bowler not knowing if we would be able to connect with her. i just kind of did a kind of inflection on what are some things that i can do in the meantime to move my own appeal forward. just identified pretty quickly ten measures that seemed reasonable. i wanted to demonstrate that we listened and that we heard your feedback loud and clear at the first part of this. so that's contained in the brief. a big part of what i wanted to do also is just take more time to your disadvantage to try to grasp the condition of ten trees over for this format without a brief in advance. and we've submitted that material. it contains in the exhibits our original staff presentation that occurred in may at the public works hearing. but also i went back on september 16th because i could tell from the feedback i was i was receiving that some of these images weren't really kind of revealing some of the defects that the trees clearly had. and one of the things i did when i returned is i brought a mallet, which is old school technique, but you can hollow i'll show a demonstration in a moment. you can sound a tree just like when you're trying to find a stud on a wall with with that sort of regularity before you go punching a hole in anything you can, you can determine. okay there's nothing behind this drywall and so that's what i documented when i returned on the 16th, as well as just taking measurements. there was a request for more specific how much decay is present during that process? i discovered that tree ten, though it had bark on the outside, it simply flaked away on me. that tree is in your jurisdiction. when there's an act of appeal, a contacted julie rosenberg to state that there's so much decay on that tree that i just need to post it as an emergency. when we met on site yesterday, the appellant agreed that we could move on to the other trees that we i had proven my point on that tree. but again , going from where we were three weeks ago to then saying that one of these should be removed as an emergency, it was not taken lightly on our part. but at a certain point when information is brought to my attention, we have to act on that. that said, provided the additional documentation, we'll get to the replacement tree plan in a moment. we're not going to have time to go through all these images. this evening, but just again, showing the public right of way is from face of curb to 12ft in. that's designated in the monument maps. the city has. this is a location of the subject, trees and the proximity of the parking garage for the first three trees would remain on. i'm not worried about wind exposure for these trees are very tall and already very exposed. the street trees would remain adjacent to these trees. so tree one, two, three and 14 and 15 don't have decay. they don't have the issues that we identified with all the other ten trees. the issues that these trees have are relatively predictable. after 40 to 50 year lifespan, i would say these trees were very well maintained. had they been topped two years ago, these trees would have needed to be removed decades ago. so again, we stated that this species doesn't grow to be that long lived. we've really gotten the max time we can out of these. we've denied five of the trees based on their individual conditions and one of the things i wanted to show was just that, you know, to the layperson, an this might look like, oh, this is cute. this is where birds and wildlife can can live. and that's true in a forest, but in an urban forest, it becomes a public safety concern. so i did measure this cavity here on tree number five. and we'll just pull this up, linking it to a google just to show there's no trick of the tape measure. this one went in without even the probe. i just was able to literally put the measuring tape all the way in 30in. without doubt, breaking out all the decay first. so literally 30 inch amount of decay at the base of the trunk, decayed wood has no strength holding capacity. so too much decay means the tree becomes structurally unstable and unsound. the only other video i want to show, just to demonstrate what what it sounds like when there's a cavity in a tree is this video here? this is the old school technique of using a mallet to listen for hollowness. and let's see, this will just take a second. so again, we did this through all ten trees and found that there's extensive decay as we knew. but i just wanted to provide additional information so that there's a little bit more reassurance about the need to remove the ten and that that was our final and best offer as we sometimes say, while that's loading, we'll get on to the replacement tree plan in just a moment. this will be the last video that i show when i was sounding out some of these trees. i had a neighbor across the street approach me and literally say my goodness, does that mean it's hollow? that's taking a while to load. i will move on from that in the interest of covering more ground , we believe that removal of the ten trees is very reasonable. this is a property owner who's trying to manage their property. they've done a good job managing these trees over the years. they've never been excessively pruned and the reward is that the trees lived this long to begin with. this is the emergency, just completely full of decay. and this is what the tree looked like prior on the left a year ago in september. but once i started sounding that the bark flaked right off as additionally the roots on some of these trees. you sound those are also hollow and then i did find armillaria root rot armillaria. mellea. it's a very decay. 30s. it's a decay pathogen that rott's trunk tree roots. so so with that, regarding replacement trees, we started with three among this row we have existing street trees. i was proposing one tree in between, but i think we can get up to two trees in between the street trees to bring it to six on alice and one around the corner on laguna for a total of seven. thank you. that's the end of the seven minutes. thank you. thank you, president swig. and then commissioner lundberg. thank you, mr. buck, for a good rally back to getting us all informed and with your diligent study and great explanation. you mentioned that there have been three study done, arborist studies done, and then the appellant mentioned a stage two study. i've never heard that terminology before for my sake and that of the commissioners. can you describe what a stage two would be? but it also sounds , is it really necessary to do a stage two or any other inspection, given that you've already had three arborist not too mention you walk ing, as we've all seen and seeing a lot of rot and justification. but tell us about stage two. and regardless of what it is, is it really worth it? sure. thank you, commissioner. the qualification in so there was a arborist report. i would call it an arborist feedback regarding two reports. so on september 20th, just about a week ago, ellen shea, who full disclosure , is a friend of mine, i've worked with her since 2000 and various capacities. i respect her work. she didn't produce a report that assesses the overall condition of all the trees, but she did find fault with, i would say, some of the old school approaches to assessing risk and risk management. it doesn't mean that they're wrong. it just means that there are a number of different ways to go about quantifying how much decay, how much risk exists and what those targets are are ultimately, i agree with the recommendations of most of those two original reports. i agree that and i agree with ms. bowler that there is some parts of those original reports where, as an english major, i thought the writing could be a little bit better, but the kernel of the truth was they ultimately said the things we the property owner, was looking for flagging them as potential public safety concerns . so the track, the tree risk assessment qualifications that's administered by the i
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