Photo: Shown in Fernandina Observer

“Amelia Island’s trees are beloved by its residents, and problems with protecting those trees will go before the Fernandina Beach City Commission at the Commissioners’ workshop in a couple weeks. The issue drew a number of people to this week’s Commission meeting to press their concerns that real damage is ongoing to the tree canopy…

One of the problems is in development.

“You all saw the Amelia Bluff tree protection zones,” Vice Mayor Len Kreger said. “This is a major — I think there’s probably six or seven houses out there — not one of them had a tree protection zone. There was garbage, there was cinder blocks, there was everything.”

It’s crazy, he said, that there are all these tree protections that don’t seem to be carried out because of improper maintenance.

‘We’re out there planting hundreds of trees, we have a tree management plan … 17 pages, there’s like five lines devoted to tree maintenance,’ Kreger said.

He intends to reintroduce a proposal for the city to adopt tree construction procedures from an international arborist standard.

‘We lose more trees during construction — we’ll have to plant a thousand trees,’ Kreger said. ‘Remember, our canopy’s 37%. We’re never going to be able to maintain it.’

It’s a management issue they need to do better on, he added.

The discussion came on the same night as the Commission voted to protect six trees within the city as heritage trees…”

— Wes Wolfe, FloridaPolitics.com, Suanne Z. Thamm, Fernandina Observer

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