A Pennsylvania Department of Transportation plan to remove and replace nearly 50, mostly mature trees for road work on South Atherton Street in State College has drawn concerns and opposition from Centre Region residents.
The State College Tree Commission voted unanimously to express their opposition to the plan as currently designed and refer the matter to borough council for further consideration following a nearly two-hour public hearing last Thursday.
Borough staff is currently working on notes and an analysis tentatively expected to be presented to council at a meeting in March, according Douglas Shontz, assistant to the borough manager.
Borough Council President Jesse Barlow, who was among those who spoke against the removal plan during the tree commission meeting, told StateCollege.com that because Atherton Street is a state road, any action council takes would be “advisory” in nature.
“It’s frustrating,” Barlow said. “If PennDOT wants to remove those trees, they can.”
More than 30 residents spoke during the tree commission’s hearing, all saying PennDOT needs to reevaluate the plan and find a way to reduce the number of trees that will be impacted.
Resident Cynthia Reeder said community members are dismayed by “what seems to be the wholesale destruction of some beautiful mature trees,” and wanted more information about what environmental impact studies were conducted.
“My husband and I bought a house here seven and a half years ago and we’ve watched the slow deterioration of many of the things that drew us to State College,” Reeder said. “Our downtown, once low-rise buildings, is turning into a concrete jungle where few trees can even cohabitate with the buildings.”
The removals are part of the plan for PennDOT’s next phase of Atherton Street work, which stretches from Curtin Road on North Atherton Street to just past Westerly Parkway on South Atherton Street. The project started with gas line relocation work last summer and fall but will begin in earnest in mid to late May with the start of borough utility relocations.
Work is expected to conclude in early summer 2024 and also will involve pedestrian and traffic signal improvements, three-foot widening of a portion of the project area, paving and new curbs and, most critically to the road and the tree issue, new drainage, which will be installed along the curbline.
Borough arborist Lance King said the 46 trees slated for removal and replacement are between the West Beaver Avenue intersection and just beyond the Westerly Parkway intersection. Several trees between West College Avenue and West Beaver Avenue are scheduled to be removed and replaced as part of a borough streetscape project that is being folded into the PennDOT work. Another 37 trees in the project area will not be impacted.
Though King said PennDOT has agreed to replace 46 trees (with younger, smaller trees), Dean Ball, PennDOT assistant district executive for design, said PennDOT is “committed to replacing as many as we can.”
“We will strive to do that as long as we can come up with 46 locations that we feel are adequate, that don’t hinder sight distance, that don’t hinder utilities, don’t cause any other type of liability or issue to our roadway network that goes through the borough,” Ball said.
Since November PennDOT has been identifying areas in the corridor that would work for planting new trees and working with King on the species types for the new plantings, project manager Eric Murnyack said. He expected to have a plan for which trees and where they would be planted to present to King within the next week.
State College Borough Councilwoman Deanna Behring has heard more about this issue in the past month than almost any other during her tenure on council, and said that when she and her peers were briefed by PennDOT about the project in November, they were told tree removal would be “minimal.”
Noting that Ball said PennDOT would “strive” to replace the 46 trees and that the other 37 “should” be preserved, Behring wanted more certainty.
“I think we need better assurances from PennDOT after hearing so many amazing arguments from our public,” Behring said.
PennDOT staff consulted and walked the project area with King and the department’s own arborist and utilized a Penn State guide for determining “failure boundaries” to determine areas where trees would need to be removed. King said his recommendations took into account PennDOT’s project design, species and condition of each tree and sight distance issues.
Several landscape architects from Penn State said the university’s guide for tree removal is just that — a guide and not hard-and-fast rules. Bill Elmendorf, a borough tree commission member and chair of the university’s tree commission, said Penn State staff are “thoughtful” about which trees are removed for a construction project and take care to ensure that only those that must be removed are.
Multiple community members — including residents, landscape architects, environmental experts and advocates — said PennDOT should take time to more closely evaluate each tree, looking at its root structure and deciding if it truly needs to be removed.
Many cited the myriad benefits that mature trees bring to a community. Tom Flynn, a landscape architect for Penn State’s Office of the Physical Plant, said a tree valued at $250 to $600 has “$90,000 in direct benefits, not including the aesthetic, natural or social benefits” during its lifetime.
“The public judges communities having green roads more positively, with ratings of visual quality for adjoining cities or towns increasing as the amount of roadside vegetation increases,” Flynn said,
Mature trees are also effective at sequestering carbon and capturing stormwater, Flynn said, and they have psychological benefits, including reducing stress and causing drivers to slow down.
PennDOT’s own roadside beautification manual cites improved aesthetics, safety, roadway enhancement and environmental management as reasons for providing roadside landscaping, Flynn pointed out.
Lara Fowler, a borough resident and environmental law professor at Penn State who serves on the Chesapeake Bay Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee, said the benefits of mature trees in reducing the heat island effect in urban areas and reducing pollution are well-established. Pennsylvania, she said, “is spending a lot of time,” considering ways to reduce urban and rural stormwater and runoff.
“Different size trees absorb water differently,” Fowler said. “The co-benefits of larger trees for absorbing water and pollutants is pretty significant. … I happen to live on a street where we’ve lost a lot of our mature trees and it really fundamentally affects what the neighborhood looks like, how stormwater moves through the system, how much hotter our house is, and I can’t imagine the impact of doing that for [46] trees along a street like this.”
She added that the Centre Region Council of Governments just recently adopted a climate action and adaptation plan that has among its goals to “grow and maintain healthy tree canopy.”
Two members of the Nittany Valley Environmental Coalition, Dorothy Blair and David Stone, pointed to State College’s environmental bill of rights, added to the borough charter about 10 years ago, as a means of leverage.
“It gives us power and we should be using that,” Blair said.
Several speakers said PennDOT should provide more opportunity for public input before the removals move forward and that the community should have a voice in how its roads and pathways are designed.
“PennDOT, their focus is to get a project done on budget. Our focus is we’re a community that needs to preserve the things we find important and we should have a say in this,” said Jenny Hwozdek, a State College native who now lives in Benner Township. “There’s got to be some other alternatives.”
Marc McDill, an associate professor of forest management at Penn State, said the project needs to be “completely rethought” from more than a transportation perspective.
“We need landscape architects; we need people to think about the environment that we want on that street and to rethink about the sidewalk… the whole thing,” McDill said. “It’s not just a matter of OK, let’s see what we can tweak here and there to save one or two trees or 10 even. We really need to think about how do we do this right. This is a great opportunity. We have a lot of expertise in this town. We need to step back and have a conversation about this and really design something special with this street while we’re doing all this, not just put in a better transportation corridor.”
The tree commission has no authority to tell PennDOT what can and can’t be removed, but is “very deeply concerned about this plan,” member Catherine Dauler said.
“It’s true that road improvements need to be made. Storm sewer issues are a real problem on Atherton Street…,” Dauler said. “We’ve all noticed the construction that was done on North Atherton, where I don’t know if there was a single tree that had to be taken down because it’s a very commercial strip. …Where we are now in the borough, we’re talking about the gateway to our community, and not just State College. I think that’s really critical when we think about this project. I think it’s also important that we continue to suggest strongly that borough council get involved in more of a conversation with PennDOT.”
