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HomeMy WebLinkAbout4/21/2026 Item Public Comment, Schmidt Richard Schmidt <slobuild@yahoo.com> Sent:Wednesday, April To:E-mail Council Website Subject:AGENDA CORRESPONDENCE item not on agenda Re: the SLOREP oak April 14, 2026 Dear Mayor and Council, I am writing again to urge the city and our council members/mayor to use their good offices to put an end to SLOREP’s plan to cut down the magnificent oak owned by we the people, protection of which is part of the legal agreement allowing SLOREP’s use of our valuable public land. The very least the city must do is delay transfer of the land to SLOREP’s control until SLOREP drops its tree removal scheme and agrees to follow its promise to keep our oak. The reason this is essential is SLOREP has made clear the minute it has control the chain saws move in. More on this in a moment. But first I want to use strong words about what’s now become obvious — that SLOREP increasingly appears to be operating in bad faith about the oak. SLOREP. The more they try to defend the indefensible act they are determined to carry out, the less sense they make and the brighter their apparent bad faith shines. SLOREP now has a web page justifying removal of our oak. It is headlined “Balancing Tree Preservation and Progress.” BALANCING a legal and ethical requirement for obtaining the gift of permanent $1 per year use of our prime downtown land against something called “progress?” Really? Because that’s pretty weird. First of all, there’s nothing to “balance.” This remains a both/and situation, not the Manichaean divergence SLOREP insists they face. SLOREP can just leave the oak alone, do its best to protect it from construction insults, and build its theater. A lot of us who know trees, and native oaks in particular, are pretty sure the oak will survive OK. If we’re wrong, and it succumbs later, well, that’s the proper time to remove it, not now while it’s healthy and strong and zesting for life. The fact a community group offered to pay for such unlikely future removal (in addition to construction monitoring by an expert arborist and other arborist perks to benefit the oak), and SLOREP rejected their kind and generous offer, further illuminates the bad faith underlying SLOREP’s anti-oak position. SLOREP “considers the subject closed,” they said in their rejection letter. Let’s just be honest: SLOREP wants our oak gone. Period. Why? Well, in its recent statements, SLOREP has justified removal in economic terms: it will cost more to protect the oak than to remove it, and SLOREP just can’t afford the EXTRA cost. That’s a silly argument since the costs of protecting the oak, if that were in fact SLOREP’s intent, were already baked into the cost of the project. These costs are not a last- minute add-on. Unless, that is, protecting the oak was never SLOREP’s intent, and the project budget was developed with removal in mind. The costs cited by SLOREP would sound impressive if they came out of your or my wallet, but that’s not their context. In terms of this project’s cost, they are nothing — rounding errors, if that. So SLOREP is trying to manipulate us with its public statements bemoaning “extra cost.” SLOREP also alleges removing the oak will give constructors more freedom to move about on and abuse the site. Well, that’s certainly true — bulldoze the oak now and there’s nothing left to protect and constructors can run amok. But that’s not our agreement. Saving the oak is our agreement. That requires a greater level of constructor care. Constructors frequently confront this sort of “obstruction” on job sites and know how to work around it. For responsible constructors, 1 protecting our oak during construction is not an exotic exercise. So this argument put forth by SLOREP is at best irrelevant, at worst further evidence of intent to set aside their ethical duties. SLOREP alleges it always wanted to save our oak, and intended to do so, till an arborist report they commissioned said the oak was doomed and recommended pre-emptive removal — that is, removal rationalized by fears of future unknowns. There are many problems with this story, including: 1. What did SLOREP ask the arborist to do? They claim they asked for protection-during-construction advice. The arborist claims they asked him for a “feasibility of retention” report, which if so would indicate SLOREP had tipped the scale toward removal even before hiring an arborist. These conflicting purposes-of-report are contradictory. So there’s a truthfulness problem on someone’s part from the git-go. 2. SLOREP says it was shocked and dismayed by the removal recommendation. 3. The arborist based his removal recommendation on the eye-poppingly preposterous allegation construction would disturb or destroy 86% to 95% of the oak’s root zone, and was unsurvivable. Such a claim should be questioned under any circumstances, and any recipient of such a report who valued the oak would follow up with lots and lots of questions and most-likely a second opinion from another arborist. The root location/disturbance claim was based not on site investigation of actual root locations but on a textbook theory about possible root locations. Since this site has a continuous decades-long history of actual root zone disturbance which suggests the oak would have a truncated root spread compared to an oak growing in nature, the claim about theoretical, but undocumented, root location appears to have even less validity than at first glance. 4. What did SLOREP do? It failed to do what any prudent actor in a life-and-death drama would do — to get a second opinion, which might have characterized the previous report’s radical conclusion as hyperbole and poppycock, and charted a path forward for protecting our oak. Failure to seek this cost-effective second opinion suggests strongly SLOREP not only didn’t want a second opinion but was quite happy to have a rationale to remove our oak. 5. Instead of pursuing the obvious low cost alternative of a second arborist opinion, SLOREP claims it exhausted “all alternatives.” How? “We spent six weeks with our architects, engineers and consultants to explore redesign options.” Of course, after this arduously intimate and intense undertaking, SLOREP’s conclusion hadn’t changed: chainsaws were the solution. “Seeking the Council’s permission to remove the tree was a step we took reluctantly and only after considering all of our redesign options.” But before testing the most obvious and low cost option: a second arborist opinion which may have mooted any need for substantial redesign. Remarkably, even after private citizens offered to provide a second arborist’s inspection, free of charge, SLOREP remained in league with the chainsaws, and rejected the offer. The City. Our city is complicit in many ways in this pending crime against our oak, some ways obvious, like the council’s rushing too fast to chainsaws despite legal and ethical obligations to protect our oak and obvious problems with the factuality of rationales for removal. The council’s vote against the tree was larded with staff/SLOREP-generated hysteria (mantra for which: “it can’t survive!”) and unscientific statements we were assured were “science” speaking to us, and an overall lack of critical thought about the facts, their meaning, and reasonable alternatives to chainsaws. This was not the council’s finest moment. It therefore bears reconsideration. Other complicities are less obvious, some of which I’ll mention later. So, mayor, council and staff are deeply enmeshed in creating this mess. And many, many residents, aware of this complicity, are most unhappy with the city’s actions to date. This citizen unhappiness is not going to just go away; it will metastasize if the oak comes down preemptively prior to construction. Some of the city’s complicities are out in the open and fairly obvious, first among them the special relationship between city staff (and by extension the council/mayor) that’s been built between our nominally representative democratic public municipal corporation and the privileged, elitist private entity SLOREP. Through this relationship SLOREP has gained much from we the people, without we the people ever signing on: to wit, decades-long essentially free use of the old city library and now an on-going 99+ year agreement for essentially free use of prime downtown real estate belonging to we the people. These land deals amount to millions of dollars of conscripted gifts transferred from us to them, without any clear rationale justifying such as being in our interests. (So, to be blunt, when SLOREP gets this sort of handout one might think they would be a bit more respectful and gracious than to insist they have the “necessity” to chainsaw our oak!) The city has also contributed $6.7 million to SLOREP’s construction fund. This extraordinary gift of public funds amounts to nearly one third of fundraising for the new theater. It is a forced donation of about $150 from every woman, man and child living in the city of SLO. Yet, as part of the special relationship between city and SLOREP, it was not the product of public demand or public process, but was worked out in private between staff and SLOREP, presented with ample lobbying to the council for approval, and added to the list of public gifts to SLOREP that don’t ever appear to have been weighed for public benefit compared to alternative expenditure of the dollars. Thus, for example, privileged elitist SLOREP gets its millions, but when disability advocates ask the city to build corner sidewalk ramps needed by we the people, there’s never any money available and the city’s mandate to provide ramps at more than 500 corners that lack them 2 continues to be ignored. Such twisting of public needs is a typical outcome of special relationships between government and select private groups of privilege. Over time, special relationships of this sort turn weird, even toxic. From the beginning there are questions of substance, like why this group and not that one gets public funds, or why not use the public funds for truly public purposes instead of giving them away? In time, such relationships become assumed perpetual entitlements in which the privileged group loses sight of its true benefactors (we the people) and feels it can ignore them or even dismiss them with a pat on the head — as one would a dog; negotiations between the parties take place at the staff level, bureaucrat to bureaucrat, with kabuki formalities involving the council providing an insincere veneer of propriety. And so it has become with SLOREP and our oak. City staff, faced with SLOREP’s trying to weasel out of saving the oak, whose preservation is a requirement of SLOREP’s lease of public land, fell into this special relationship’s preference for subjugation of public needs to deference for privileged private desires. Staff, faced with a questionable conclusion about oak viability, could have ordered SLOREP to get a second opinion from a preservation-minded arborist. But staff didn’t. Staff could have hired a second arborist to tell how to protect the public asset staff should have been looking to protect. But staff didn’t. Staff doubled down on SLOREP’s demand it be allowed to proceed with a design SLOREP implicitly admitted didn’t meet oak preservation objectives required by its lease, and greased the skids for council approval. The council, much to its disfigurement, stooped to comply with what the council had to know was a bad vote. (Remember, among other red flags, the huge number of letters from we the people urging the council to deny SLOREP’s oak removal?) Thus, special relationships with privileged groups lead to bad public practices that surrender important opportunities and principles before the battle’s been engaged. On the other side, the special relationship helped SLOREP shift the blame for its own shortcomings to the city. Their pro- oak-killing propaganda reeks with hiding behind the city’s skirt — starting with the council vote (characterized by SLOREP as “the City Council’s thorough vetting of our request”), which they take as complete vindication and justification for their oak-killing preference. Justified entitlement writ large! Set up to make the council look bad. SLOREP also drags the city arborist into rationalizing their oak-killing scheme. According to SLOREP, not one, but two “independent” “professional” arborists concluded “that the tree is unlikely to survive” because almost the oak’s entire root zone would be damaged beyond survivability, and that’s all the proof needed to justify pre-emptive oak killing rather than giving the oak a chance. (This seems a bit like giving grandma a lethal injection rather than a chance to survive an illness, does it not?) As pointed out elsewhere, the word “professional” when applied to arborists has no meaning since “arborist” is not a licensed profession in California. Using “professional” in this manner is meaningless word-inflation intended to influence the reader; i.e., it’s propaganda. As for the second “independent” arborist who’s in 100% agreement with the first arborist? Who might this late-arriving actor be? Ah, it turns out they’re talking about our city arborist. There are problems here, starting with job description. Our arborist’s two main duties are to manage the urban forest, and to administratively process applications for tree removals. In this case, his role was that of permit processor. His duties do not include offering “independent” arboricultural services to private parties (and there’s no evidence I’m aware of that in this case he did). So a claim by SLOREP that he studied the oak and arrived “independently” at an opinion to SLOREP’s liking and identical to SLOREP’s hired arborist, is false. But clever since it transfers additional blame onto the city, and away from SLOREP. SLOREP further tries to drag city staff into the matter by alleging, in the context of reworking project design to better protect the oak, a task they claim consumed weeks of work with their own “team,” that city staff’s equally fruitless co-equal effort to do the same ended with similar results. “Considering the many weeks that our team and the City Staff have invested in analyzing potential solutions” SLOREP says “timely completion of the new theater” takes precedence over the oak. You know, like in “Balancing Tree Preservation and Progress.” While I have no idea what staff may have done to analyze “potential solutions,” as there’s no public record of such activity, I sorta doubt the city did much, if anything, and am quite confident (given the city’s demonstrated lack of both design skills and design sensitivity) the city has not turned itself into a design services firm serving private clients. So, again, it appears SLOREP has exaggerated in order to spread the blame to the city. Hey, if city staff can’t figure this out, the oak’s gotta go. So there you have some of the rancidity with which the city’s special relationship with SLOREP now reeks. It’s your fault, they imply, the oak gets cut down. Nice way to repay the city’s generosity and set up council/mayoral incumbents for fall’s re-election campaign as tree killers. What I imagine SLOREP considers its finest argument against our oak’s existence is its profession of responsibility to its donors. Thus SLOREP states the oak must be eliminated ASAP “to ensure the successful and timely completion of the 3 new theater.” In other words, they must move with haste. “As stewards of this project, we must also be mindful of our responsibility to our donors.” The only responsibility they specifically cite is that of saving donors the “extra” costs of trying to save the oak. They ignore other matters entirely, like whether going back on a promise of oak preservation at the last minute shows respect to donors who gave believing oak preservation was part of the deal. I, for example, am a donor, and I feel like SLOREP’s intransigence on even considering preservation is like their sticking their thumbs in my eyes and pressing hard. How are my interests served by the sort of narrow minded penny-pinching donor fiduciary responsibility SLOREP claims to exercise on my behalf? I suspect SLOREP’s board has not even considered how its blunder-bussing ahead with pre-emptive oak removal might delay, rather than speed, construction. For example, what if I, as a disaffected donor, were to file injunctive legal action to enforce the lease’s oak protection and overturn the transparently self-serving CEQA changes made to facilitate the oak’s removal? That could delay construction for months to years. Further, with a council election looming this fall, and certainty the oak’s demise would be an issue if it takes place before then, what might become of SLOREP’s rancid special relationship with the city? I don’t think SLOREP has thought through the weakness of the case its cheapness has created, or the problems it has created for itself. Stating “the Board considers the subject closed” just deepens the trench they’re digging for their own failure. It really seems to me that if SLOREP had its head screwed on straight, they’d be saving the oak rather than chainsawing it. It’s in their self-interest every bit as much as it’s in the oak’s best interest. City Action Required. Given SLOREP’s intransigence, they’re not going to just throw in the towel, because they’ve indicated they see themselves as privileged to do as they wish and thus don’t care. They don’t care that, as they put it, “Some residents objected to our request” to chainsawing the oak. But the city should care. Whatever, the future of our oak is in the city’s hands. You must take action to save it. There are many plausible ways to do this. First, the city must delay transfer of the oak to SLOREP’s control, to buy time to sort this out. Second, the council could behave as wise grown-ups, admit (or not) that your initial permission was hasty, that new facts and insights have been brought to light, and rescind your permission to chainsaw our oak. That would decisively resolve the matter and force SLOREP to behave responsibly to we the people. Third, while delaying transfer, the city could hire a preservation-sympathetic arborist to render a second opinion, and proceed accordingly after that opinion is rendered. Fourth, as individuals, council and staff could approach SLOREP board members they know and explain the situation is spiraling out of control, and that’s not good for SLOREP, and persuade them to reconsider their “subject closed” attitude. Fifth, you’re all smart politicians and I’m confident you individually and collectively have additional ideas for accomplishing what must be accomplished, and urge you to pursue them. OUR OAK DESERVES LIFE. DO WHAT YOU MUST TO ASSURE THAT. LONG LIVE OUR OAK! Thank you. Richard Schmidt 4