HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, Fla. — For Susan Roghair, there’s a lot to love in her Tampa neighborhood, Riverside Heights.
“The neighbors. The beautiful trees. The beautiful streets. We’ve got brick streets. We’ve got little libraries. We’ve got four parks,” she said.
Right now, however, Roghair and half a dozen other neighbors on ABC Action News talked about feeling their neighborhood lost some of its charm as a contractor for Tampa Electric (TECO) trims trees there.
“They do need to be trimmed, but not butchered like this — not butchered like this at all,” Roghair said.
Roghair said she’s seen them trimmed before, but never to the extreme of the most recent trim.
Some mature hardwood trees now have a deep V-shape cut down the middle.
“I’m totally blown away at how crappy of a job they did,” one of the neighbors told ABC Action News after examining the trimmed oak in his front yard.
While some neighbors complained about aesthetics, Roghair said she’s most concerned about the trees' safety and if what’s left of them will hold up to Mother Nature.
“They don’t look stable, really. They just don’t look stable,” Roghair said. “As far as recourse, we would just like the professional arborists and professional people that know how the trees should be cut — that they’re cut accordingly.”
Cherie Jacobs, a spokesperson for TECO, said the trees were cut according to national standards.
According to TECO’s website, the utility has been nationally recognized for 15 straight years “for the care it takes to protect trees.”
With hurricane season now here, Jacobs reminded us that trees are the leading cause of power outages. According to Jacobs, the trees in Riverside Heights were specifically trimmed “for storm safety” and “in anticipation of storm season.”
She also said the trimming did not jeopardize the health or structure of the trees in question.
Melissa Kelley, another neighbor concerned by the tree trimming, disagrees.
“We have to have safe power lines, but again, I think that they went to an extreme, so now we’re stuck with a situation where the trees are unsightly,” she said. “The branches are possibly going to come down in a storm. I don’t think they’re safe.”
Kelley says the work in her neighborhood is not done, and she hopes the City of Tampa will get involved.
“There should be some oversight here,” she said. “There should be some management.”
