[ChipRoyce]

"Inspectors technically received notice from Helen Wood, a board member of the environmental nonprofit organization Conservation Montgomery. "We all have a stake, really, in their trees,” Wood told the Post. "By regulation, they have a plan that’s approved that allows them to have their beautiful golf course, their lovely grounds. But they have, if nothing else, a civic responsibility to fulfill their conservation role in the county. And that’s a legal responsibility.”
Conservation role? Only in DC....
Cut 'em all down, if you ask me


https://www.golfdigest.com/story/disgruntled-member-tattles-on-congressional-for-tree-removal-without-a-permit

[Pete_Pittock]

20,000 sq ft of tree canopy (100x200). I would guess that would be about 10-15 mature deciduous trees.

[PThomas]

Rules are rules

[John Emerson]

I can’t, for the life of me, understand what good can come of snitching on your own Club.  I say cut them all down but that’s besides the point.  Sounds like a bunch of egos and drama.  Putting themselves above the game

[Rees Milikin]

Narc

[Marty Bonnar]

This is one of the saddest threads I’ve ever seen here.
Love or hate trees, they are so important to the environment, that some of them get protection. That doesn’t mean to say they can’t be removed under the right circumstances.
Ignorance or flagrant disregard for rules is no position for anyone to take, far less a golf club presumably stuffed with governmental types who should know better and who have a responsibility to demonstrate some leadership.
The only tattling going on here is the content of the utterly dire Golf Digest article.
F.

[Duncan Cheslett]

It makes sense for clubs to remove trees on occasion without consulting their members - otherwise nothing would ever happen.


To do so in breach of the law however, is reprehensible and stupid. If nothing else it will turn member sentiment even further against sensible tree removal that would benefit the course

[John McCarthy]

I can’t, for the life of me, understand what good can come of snitching on your own Club.  I say cut them all down but that’s besides the point.  Sounds like a bunch of egos and drama.  Putting themselves above the game

Ego and drama, in D.C.?  Well I never....

[Lou_Duran]

It makes sense for clubs to remove trees on occasion without consulting their members - otherwise nothing would ever happen.

To do so in breach of the law however, is reprehensible and stupid. If nothing else it will turn member sentiment even further against sensible tree removal that would benefit the course

Unfortunately, "the law" is so voluminous and encompassing that in many places, if someone of authority wanted to take someone out, "the law" can be used in very violent, inconceivable ways (reference the sailor who took couple pictures of his submarine for his family and ends up in the brig).

Many people have an image of Texas as an environmentally unfriendly, gun-toting, dog-eat-dog place.  One of the top Dallas private clubs completed a major renovation of its 70+ year old course.  The site has nice topography for the area, natural creeks, and large, plentiful specimen trees separating most of the holes.

The renovation took a long time, but it came out really well.  The architect noted during a Q & A session that considerable thought had been given to such issues as grass selection (the membership chose to go with bent, though he personally preferred a hybrid Bermuda), challenge and playability, ongoing maintenance, etc.

Though they removed quite a few trees (probably concentrating on the lesser varieties), it appeared to me and others that the course remained too "forested".  Someone asked if this was something missed during the renovation. The architect replied that he would like to have removed many more, but Dallas's tree ordinance essentially required replacing caliper inch per caliper inch or paying the city an equivalent amount to do so elsewhere, would have cost upwards of an additional $1 Million for the other trees identified for removal.

Conversely, I was just up in Ohio visiting a course which has an ongoing tree removal program during the winter.  Only the cost of removal is an issue and the club now has its own chipper.  Ditto for a course I visited in CO last month.  Funny how stereotypes are often so wrong.       

[Jon Wiggett]

Lou,


you are spot on and it is unfortunate that many of the rules and guidelines end up doing the opposite of that which would be desired.


In the end the like for like is silly as there is no natural example of this nor is it desirable. What clubs and the authorities should be looking for is a long term (i.e. 100 year+) general plan for the maintenance of the trees/bushes which is assessed on a rolling basis in respect to the yearly work done. If you fell a 100 year old tree then it might be replaced by 3 saplings though not necessarily in the same place and probably 2 of these 3 will be thinned out in the first few decades.


It is the overall picture that is important not the details.


Jon

[Lou_Duran]

Jon,

Talk about unintended consequences, as Dallas was passing its tree ordinance and other cities in the area were in the process of following suit, numerous large owners of commercial tracts clear-cut their properties preemptively.  Mind you that specimen trees- pecans and oaks primarily- add great value to the land, especially residential lots, and developers in the past took great care to save some of those as they completed the site work and construction.  Post tree ordinance, it became much cheaper to go back and include new trees as part of the landscape plan, most which were of the cheap, fast-growing/dying, crappy variety (Bradford Pear, swamp cypress, cedar elm, poplar, etc.).

I've read that the U.S. has more treed acreage today than it did at the time of the founding.  Most tree ordinances are more tax policy than conservation/ecology.  I would bet that if someone would audit the city's revenues for tree replacement against actual trees planted, that a very large variance would be found.  Like the gasoline tax here, those revenues fund numerous other things than advertised.

[Jerry Kluger]

I lived near Congressional for more than 30 years and I am very familiar with the courses in the area as well as the policies of the local government.  I believe the history of Congressional includes its use as a military facility during WWII.  After the war up to the 1970s it was common for parkland courses in that area to plant hundreds and hundreds of trees with the purpose to create visual hole separation.  Most of those trees were cheap pines that had a limited life expectancy and were really ugly. 


I was a member at course that was about 10 miles from Congressional which had 2 courses.  The owners sold the club to a housing developer and it was planned that houses would be built around a new course.  The architects submitted a plan for the course and they were told that holes could not include shots that required going over a stream that ran through the course.  They did allow for the removal of hundreds of trees to build the course and the houses.   The architects could not come up with a plan to deal with the stream issue so the developer decided not to build a new course and just built more houses.  I guess asphalt, water runoff from houses, etc. were preferred.


I don't know how many of you are familiar with Montgomery County, Maryland but it is one of the highest income counties in the country and there is so much building going on - and incidental removal of trees - that to challenge Congressional for their tree removal is absurd.

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