BELLEAIR, Fla. — The sight outside Pamela Palmer's window has left her stumped.
"It was devastating. It was shocking," she said.
The root of Palmer's shock: new construction outside her window.
"I went to bed the other night with a full foliage of trees and woke up to half a dozen or more of these 200-year-plus oak trees gone," she said.
On Thursday, the remaining pieces of the trees were carted away. All that was left behind on Mehlenbacher Road was a row of stumps.
"I don't believe it was necessary. And if it was, I think it could have worked around the trees. I don't think you need to destroy nature for a beautification project," Palmer said.
Pinellas County is adding a sidewalk in the path once carved out by the row of trees.
Rob Meador, the county's transportation engineering and capital improvements manager, said the road is one of many in the county needing a sidewalk.
"We have a need to provide connectivity for residents for walkers and cyclists," Meador said. "This project was to connect Indian Rocks Road, the sidewalk there, with the Pinellas Trail."
It's not just the trees that have Palmer concerned. She remembers a particularly devastating flood during her teen years.
"Mehlenbacher Road turned into a river. And, of course, growing up as a teenager, we had fun getting out all the buoys and all the boats we could find and traveling down Mehlenbacher Road from Belleair Bluffs. So the drainage ditches were put in, you know, to relieve that and prevent any further flooding," she recalled.
Meador said there's a plan in place to ensure flooding isn't an issue.
"When we get into a roadway with an open ditch, it takes a lot of work to figure out how that drainage is going to function with that sidewalk. You're taking up a lot of right of way, or even limited right away, to try and fit a lot of concrete, a lot of different aspects into that right away," he explained. "So in this case, some of the ditches would be closed with pipe, and then the sidewalk placed on top of it and other locations, we tried to preserve that ditch to help with water quality treatment from runoff from the roadway and the sidewalk and keep that sidewalk pushed back towards the right of way as far as we can."
He explains there are even rules in place to ensure adequate drainage.
"Every project is designed with maximum storms in mind. Not the flash flood from a hurricane, that type of thing, necessarily. But we do have requirements for the type of storm and the intensity of rain that falls to be captured within the drainage system, whatever that system may be," he added.
The county said branching out and adding that new sidewalk took a lot of research and leg work.
"We did a field walk-through with our Urban Forestry Group to figure out what trees could be saved, which ones were in bad condition and we could not save. Then which ones would be damaged with the project and needed to be removed," he said.
Meador explained planning for these types of projects takes time.
"Most of our projects last at least two years. From the time that we budget for it to the time that we get to construction, it's at least two years. There's a lot of examination, a lot of design standards, design requirements that we have to go through and satisfy. There are a lot of manuals that we use to figure out what is the best way to build this type of project, whatever it may be. And as a function of that, we look at all alternatives," he said.
Official construction on the sidewalk is slated to begin July 24. It's anticipated to be completed in 18 months.
Palmer, however, isn't excited about her new concrete neighbor.
"I'm just at a loss of words right now. I'm very devastated and mourning over this loss of art in our community."
