Tree Preservation
Trees are important to any community. Besides cleaning our air and offering us shade, trees can reduce energy costs, buffer sound and wind, and increase property values. To learn more about the aesthetic and practical values of our City's trees, please visit this website provided by Greenscape, the area's foremost tree advocacy organization.
In 2000, an organization called Citizens for Tree Preservation was instrumental in the passage of a City Charter Amendment which established minimum standards for the mitigation of tree removal. Click here to view the Charter Amendment. For more information, please visit Citizens for Tree Preservation's website.
Despite the intrinsic values offered by trees, real estate developers, billboard companies, and others often view trees as marginal when there is a profit to be made. Consider these trees along I-95, cut down in 2007 so that two billboards could be more easily seen from the road:
The end result looked like this:
Here is a YouTube clip illustrating the transition.
Scenic Jacksonville was formed to protect and promote the scenic beauty of Jacksonville, Florida by educating the public regarding visual pollution (such as litter, overhead wires, and sign proliferation, all of which and more can be addressed through beautification projects) and encouraging the adoption of meaningful policies for signs and outdoor advertising.