The dozens of residents who attended Monday night’s Evanston City Council meeting to protest a plan to reconstruct parts of McCormick Boulevard don’t have any objection to repairing parts of the street.
They just don’t see why 41 trees — including 11 American elms — need to die to do it.
The project seeks to repave and improve McCormick Boulevard and its drainage system between Green Bay Road and Golf Road. The intersection at Prairie Avenue, Grant Road and McCormick would also be redesigned for safety purposes.
In addition, the design calls for the replacement of any uprooted trees on a three-to-one ratio — 123 new trees.
But residents still were convinced Tuesday that the necessary improvements could be made without compromising the character of the tree-lined street. The leader of a group of concerned citizens said the question city officials should be asking is how to improve the road without removing trees as opposed to how to remove trees that are in the way of improving the road.
“We are fully supportive of them rebuilding McCormick,” said Virginia Mann, co-founder of To Rescue Evanston Elms, which tied green ribbons on trees that line McCormick. “We want them to do it in a responsible way.”
Ald. Edmund Moran (6th) said the project — six years in development — provides the city an opportunity to reconstruct the street using primarily federal and state funds of about $4 million. He said public misinformation has produced nightmarish rumors about the project, including that the city would significantly widen the road and destroy the street’s leafy canopy.
Tying ribbons to the trees, he said, didn’t help.
“If you drive down McCormick Boulevard and there’s a lot of green ribbons tied around all these elm trees,” Moran said. “People are saying ‘My God, they are going to tear all these trees down.'”
The majority of trees slated for removal are the result of a plan to widen the road, up to a foot in certain areas, and in the redesign of the intersections. Even though the road could be widened, the number of lanes would be reduced from four to two plus a painted median.
Brian Utley, who lives just north of McCormick, suggested the plan eliminate the median and narrow the road so a drainage system could be adequately installed in order to save as many trees as possible.
“We’re at the 11th hour,” said Utley, who works as the director of development for the Medill School of Journalism. “These are few remaining elms in the canopy, and the canopy is not what it used to be.”
David Jennings, director of Evanston’s public works department, said the road needed to be widened slightly to accommodate four lanes of traffic with the infrastructure improvements — in case traffic levels increase in the future.
In any event, Jennings said city staff would revisit the site to see how many trees can be saved. He suggested on Monday night that six or seven trees currently scheduled for removal could be preserved. Jennings added that many of the trees being taken down can’t even be seen from the street — and the replacement saplings would be more than visible.
“Tree preservation is consistent with what we’ve been trying to do with this project, we’re not just cutting trees wholesale,” Jennings said. “We’ve evolved from a design that would take down over 100 trees to where we are at right now.”
Even with the replacement plan, Mann said, it still would not preserve the character of the street.
“That would be like saying let’s get rid of Northwestern and put up three community colleges,” she said. “We wouldn’t do it. Let’s not do it with the trees.”
Reach Mike Cherney at [email protected].
