Trees felled for police academy

From the Times Ledger:

Residents were horrified after the city cut down 32 trees along a College Point street last week as part of the work on the new police academy.

The street trees stood in sidewalk beds along 28th Avenue between College Point Boulevard and Ulmer Street, on the north border of the College Point Police Academy development, a $1 billion facility currently under construction.

The city Parks Department said some of the trees were unhealthy and needed to be cut down, although the agency could not be more specific as to the nature of the illness and how it was caused. Others were being removed specifically to make way for the development, but the NYPD will replace all the greenery with new saplings in the future, Parks said.

In total, the NYPD plans to fell 82 trees in the process of constructing the new 3-million-square-foot training facility, according to Parks, which signs off on tree removals but was not involved in planning the trimming nor hiring contractors to do the dirty work.

In this case, the NYPD hired an arborist who inspected each of the trees before they were lopped off at the base. To comply with city laws, another arborist from Parks also signed off on the removals.

All of the trees were between 3- and 6-inch diameters, and the NYPD will replace the loss of foliage with 132 new trees, according to Parks.