[Durham INC] 700,000 Public Trees Surrendered Without Recompense

[Reyn]

  Sent to you by Reyn via Google Reader: 700,000 Public Trees
Surrendered Without Recompense via Bull City Mutterings by Reyn on
1/20/12

Yesterday, in a narrowly split vote, the North Carolina Rules Review
Commission approved “temporary” rules, which were micromanaged through
the Department of Transportation by a powerful legislator and special
interests that will permit the outdoor billboard industry to begin the
process of clearcutting 700,000 publicly owned trees, hoping to make
moot inevitable reviews and modifications by the legislature or courts.

Over the objections of 8 out of 10 North Carolinians, the General
Assembly, relentlessly badgered by two state senators over the
objections of the few legislators on both sides of the aisle who
actually read the legislation, voted to grant special interests
virtually unfettered permission to cut down trees on public property,
including many paid for with tax dollars, without compensation to the
public or any requirement for replanting, along an equivalent of 575
miles of publicly owned roadsides.

(To view illustrations of the impact of this new cutting click on each
of the the two images below, the first showing trees above the
freeway , the second showing the trees that would be eliminated.)

A judge in Georgia has already granted an injunction this type of
cutting in that state until similar legislation is reviewed for
constitutional issues also relevant in North Carolina.

The largely absentee owners of 8,000 outdoor billboards wallpapering
North Carolina’s highways, whose only property rights have been
declared by courts as “purely parasitic” because their only value is
wholly reliant on traffic made possible by the the publicly owned
roadways, will not be required to pay for the trees nor replant them
elsewhere even though the public paid to plant them.

This travesty is that the outdoor billboard industry was already able
under prior legislation to clear enough trees to be viewed. This new
legislation and administrative rules temporarily approved will now
permit clear cutting of the equivalent of nearly 2 out of every 10 of
the 5.3 million trees the North Carolina Department of Transportation
has planted over the past several decades to mitigate the impact of
roadways on storm water runoff and greenhouse gas emissions.

Rather than mitigating these “spillover costs” to unsuspecting
taxpayers, known as externalities by economists, the new legislation
and administrative rules essentially grant a public gratuity to private
concerns that is prohibited under the state constitution.

Beyond the obvious aesthetic desecration and blight created by outdoor
billboards, including what amounts to a free monopoly of view
easements, just one of the many harmful effects or “spillover costs” of
this tree cutting on the public by the outdoor billboard industry will
be the equivalent of adding 4,000 for vehicles and 48 million miles of
driving to the state’s roadways which will pollute the air annually
with 3,212 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.

It's fair to say that one of the drawbacks of a representative versus
true democracy is that far too many bills such as this are passed over
the the objection of the vast majority of citizens, not on the basis of
thorough scrutiny, but through the push and shove of internal power
politics fueled by special interests who in turn provide the campaign
contributions necessary for election.

This tendency by many elected representatives to make decisions based
on “ who‘s asking” among colleagues rather than the merits of what's
being asked is at the center of why many experts, including the
acclaimed clinical economist Jeffrey Sachs in his just published book
The Price of Civilization, believe that so much of public policy fails
to follow the core American values of fairness, sustainability and
efficiency.

To learn more about the overreaching issues involved with this new
legislation to benefit the outdoor billboard industry, click on this
link to see some of the excellent visuals supporting arguments
presented to the Rules Commission by Ryke Longest, a senior lecturing
fellow and the director of the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at
Duke University Law school.

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