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By Arthur Delaney
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Posted: 04/24/07 06:15 PM [ET] |
At 10 a.m. on Friday the 13th, Victoria Lord removed some morning glories from the tree box in front of her house on the 300 block of E Street NE. She went back inside to do some work, and when she returned to the front of her house after noon, the tree was gone. She knew what had happened.
“When I first moved to Capitol Hill people would come to your yards and steal plants and bushes and things,” she says. The thieves had upped their game over the years and finally swiped an entire tree. Lord called the police, and then she called the District Department of Transportation (DDOT).
Soon Lord received a call back from a DDOT official who told her that it was their guys who took the tree away because they had planted it only by accident the year before. That’s little consolation to Lord, who had developed a close bond to the young London Plane in front of her home. She says it was the tallest and best-looking tree on the block.
“I am peeved,” Lord says. “I hate a naked tree box.” She wishes she had known it would be taken away. She could have said goodbye. “I’ve been watering and mulching that tree box for a year.”
“Lots of people are emotionally attached to their trees,” says John Thomas, associate director of DDOT’s urban foresters. “Sometimes [tree removal] is not an easy thing for a citizen to see happen.”
But people might notice this kind of finicky behavior from city arborists more often, because Thomas’s administration has significantly stepped up its game in recent years. Three decades ago, Thomas says, city officials knew much less about proper planting. But as the science of urban forestry has progressed, things have gotten better for the city’s trees.
In Lord’s case, she says arborists told her the London Plane was too big to grow up right next to the massive Gumball already in her yard. She was told to expect a more appropriate Redbud tree next year.
It used to be that DDOT had a lot of difficulty hanging on to its professional tree caretakers, who until recently were called “horticulturists.” The low salary did little to attract the few people qualified to do the job, and the horticulturists kept leaving.
But since the District changed the title to “urban forester” and the position received a corresponding salary boost, the staff level has remained high for the past year and a half. (Only four of 15 positions are unfilled; two years ago there were 10 empty spots.)
That means there are more people to pay attention to the city’s 130,000 trees and 143,000 tree box spaces, and the situation on E Street is a testament to that (despite the error in planting the wrong tree in the first place).
“We’re on a good roll now, so knock on wood,” Thomas says, presumably with pun intended.
Wells walks the talkOn April 4, in broad daylight, an unidentified suspect raped a woman at knifepoint, and in front of the woman’s daughter, in an alley near 8th and G streets NE. An accomplice kept lookout. The police department issued a composite sketch and is offering a reward of up to $1,000 for information leading to the rapist’s arrest and indictment. Though it received little media attention, neighborhood buzz about the terrible crime has persisted.
On April 19 D.C. Councilmember Tommy Wells put on his walking shoes in a joint effort with local police Cmdr. Diane Groomes and Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Bill Schultheiss to demonstrate solidarity in the face of brutal crime. About 40 residents and city employees participated in a twilight stroll through alleys south of H Street.
“This is amazing,” said Wells at the end of the walk. He was pleased with the turnout at the event, the third such walk he’s sponsored since taking office in January. This sort of shoe-leather community involvement happened much less often under his predecessor’s long council tenure. (Only in more recent years, of course, has there been such a sizable constituency of demanding neighbors in this area, but still.)
For police and city officials, the promenade was an opportunity to learn from residents about specific locations in need of government attention, such as abandoned buildings and traffic trouble spots. And Wells might have learned that he had “arrived” as a public figure when a passing motorist saw him and shouted, “Wells!”
Groomes stressed that overall crime levels continue to drop, in spite of recent high-profile incidents (the still at-large but low-lying Burglary Bandit and the Dancing Stabber come to mind).
For neighbors, the walk was an opportunity to learn about how city officials are responding to crime and to receive advice on how to deal with it themselves. Cmdr. Groomes offered a helpful tip: No matter what bad thing is about to happen to you, the best thing to yell is, “Fire!”
But one neighbor’s comment did away with any nagging impression that this activity was only for the well-represented stroller-pushers and dog-walkers:
“We’d like that woman to know we’re here tonight.”
Fenty’s spokeswoman is Capitol Hill veteranBefore becoming the chief spokeswoman for mayor Adrian Fenty, Carrie Brooks handled press for Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.). Things were easier before she left California for Sanchez’s Washington office in 2003; the local press was manageable and, despite being three hours behind legislative activity in the Capitol, “as a general rule, people in Southern California aren’t too concerned about it.”
Washington presented the new challenge of staying on top of the news and competing with 534 other congressional staffs for media attention. But after five and a half years of congressional flacking, Brooks was interested in new challenges. When the opportunity came to flack instead for former high school classmate and fellow ex-ice cream store employee Fenty, Brooks readily hopped aboard.
Her first day on the job she was given a rude awakening by the indefatigable D.C. watchdog Dorothy Brizill, who harangued Brooks over whether she was a District resident. Brooks insisted that she was, only for Brizill to demand to know where she was registered to vote. Oops.
“I immediately the next day changed my voting registration,” Brooks says. Afterward, Brooks says she had the following worry: “Is it going to be like this every day?” And it has been, she says.
The spokeswoman has been surprised by the intensity of scrutiny for such details as the home wards of mayoral Cabinet appointments. But it’s exciting to work for the person whose decisions have such an immediate impact on the daily lives of his constituents, and Brooks is happy with her job. Still, she says, “I definitely have moments when I miss the Hill environment.” |
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