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If Washington’s professional football team ever gets with the times and decides to adopt a more sensible name, it might do well to consider something along the line of Treecutters or Lumberjacks. Because once again, there has been an inadvertent arboreal sacrifice for the greater good of the ‘Skins.
Richmond Mayor Dwight Jones is in damage control over what appears to be an excessive landscaping job at the site of the ‘Skins’ future training camp in the Virginia capital. When Richmond City Council President Charles Samuels drove by the new facility last weekend, he was stunned to find “every single tree on the property had been removed,” WTVR reports.
The ‘Skins new training camp, for which Richmond is kicking in $9 million and which lies adjacent to the Science Museum of Virginia, was supposed to be constructed with minimal impact to the area’s tree population. Furthermore, Samuels says Jones promised that for every tree that was removed during construction, a replacement would be planted.
Samuels isn’t saying the tree-trimming was done with specific intent, but he tells WTVR that he is miffed that the area round the ‘Skins training camp, which is scheduled for a June completion, is unexpectedly bare:
“While I do not believe the trees were torn down at the direction of the Administration, I am gravely concerned about the communication efforts that preceded the trees coming down, as clearly our agreement between the Administration and Richmond City Council was not honored or communicated to the construction workers,” Samuels said.
Jones is reportedly working on a remedy to the sudden dendritic massacre.
It should be noted, of course, that the ‘Skins don’t exactly have the best standing relationship with trees. In 2004, owner Dan Snyder snagged himself a better view of the Potomac River when he cut down 50,000 square feet of a federally protected forest between the his Potomac, Md. estate and the C&O Canal. Although Snyder was cleared of any wrongdoing, an Interior Department inspector general’s report two years later charged a high-ranking National Park Service official with helping Snyder obtain easy permission to cut down 130 mature trees.
