The city Parks Department is charging the MTA $520,550 to remove and replace 15 large trees from city property to enable an authority construction project. That breaks down to $34,703 apiece.
"Is that a typo?" shocked Metropolitan Transportation Board member Jonathan Ballan said Monday at the MTA Finance Committee meeting.
The Parks Department has a "standard basal area replacement formula" it uses to calculate the cost of replacing trees on city property, an MTA resolution states. The MTA needs a forestry permit from the Parks Department to remove the trees located around the Manhattan on-bound and off-bound ramps to the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. The MTA Bridges and Tunnels division wants to replace the ramp.
In case additional trees need to be removed beyond the 15 for the ramp replacement, the MTA Finance Committee approved spending up to $750,000 for removal and replacement.
So, if that's how much it costs to remove trees, why aren't developers being forced to pony up when they remove them?
8 comments:
"Robert Kennedy Bridge"?
Are you kidding me? Who calls it that named after a horse-face poetry-quoting Kennedy asshole?
It's the "Triborough Bridge".
Hmm ... not certain if I get your concern ... when the developers remove the trees, the developers' contractors are doing the tree removal ... this is what NYC Parks is charging the MTA for Parks to do the removal (which strikes me as _way_ over the top)
My concern is that contractors remove trees illegally and get away with it all the time.
Triborough Bridge. Queensborough Bridge. Interborough Parkway. Enough with the name changes.
But what does the bridge or highway names have to do with what Crapper was posting about?
The panel has no backbone. "It is what it is," they said and voted for it.
That's not the cost of tree removal. It's the cost of tree removal and replacement. One old tree ten inches across is worth much much more than one new tree three inches across. They'll be planting many new trees in the area to make up for this damage. That's what's being paid for.
Private firms might charge a fifth of what the parks department does, developers often use them. Some of those savings are more productive workers. Some is from not caring for the trees. How many of those trees survive though? And how does the quality of surviving trees compare?
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20130714/ECONOMY/307149974/staten-islands-300000-tree
I can firmly state that a specific office within the Parks Department works on hundreds of tree damage cases a year and has one dedicated employee who does nothing but seek restitution from contractors, scaffolding companies, sidewalk repair companies, water-main companies and the like, specifically for tree damage. It's one of the few offices in the world that does it, that is why no one knows it exists.
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