Lodi residents concerned for wildlife after city considers cutting down trees in local park
Jackie Newman has lived alongside Legion Park in Lodi for over 40 years, seeing the landscape and trees change and grow.
After hearing that nearly 30 of those trees could soon be cut down, she could only think of one thing: the wildlife.
"One day, I went in my backyard and there was a baby owl in my backyard, in my flower bed," she explained. "It still had all the down on it, and it couldn't fly. It was just a baby. Immediately, we locked up our gates in our backyard and said, 'Nobody's going in the backyard. This is now a habitat for a baby owl.' "
In the following weeks, more owls called Newman's backyard home.
Her worry now is that if the trees come down, where will they go?
"It's just really hard to think of all these old trees that are habitats, because they're habitat for the owls, the squirrels, the birds, and so on, it's hard to think where they're going to go," Newman shared.
She says she's not alone in that worry within her neighborhood.
CBS Sacramento took her and her neighbor's concerns to Tree Lodi, a local nonprofit that works with the city that originally did the evaluation at Legion Park.
On top of the age of the trees and their shallow root systems that can cause power outages by toppling over in a storm, they saw another problem -- power lines.
"In this case, there's high voltage lines along the north property line that the trees are starting to negatively impact," Tree Lodi President Steve Dutra said. "We don't want that for the community members. Safety is high priority."
Instead, they'll be replaced with utility-friendly trees with the community's input on what they'd like to see in the park.
We asked Dutra about the owl impact.
"It's only my opinion that they'll be impacted for a period of time," he explained. "Like us, they're very adaptable and we're not removing all the trees. We hope, and arborists are required, to mitigate, if appropriate."
Mitigation efforts also include ground and aerial surveys and inspection so of the trees.
But for Newman and her neighbors, they hope for an alternative, like trimming.
"I hope that they would find another way of doing it," Newman continued. "If the decision's made, I just hope that they look to make sure there's no nests up there or anything before they actually do it."
The tree removal has not yet been brought forward to or approved by the city of Lodi.
Tree Lodi plans on taking their findings from the evaluation to the council during their October 15 meeting, and if approved, they will start removing and replacing trees in November.