“The Lorax” sits on Kim Tanzer’s coffee table.
She reads Dr. Seuss’ environmental call to action, aloud: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
Tanzer, a former UF Board of Trustees member, said she is disappointed in UF’s conservation efforts.
In January, the University Athletic Association asked UF’s Lakes, Vegetation and Landscaping Committee to approve the removal of nine mature loblolly pines in the Bat House Woods conservation area, which borders UF golf course’s seventh green. The trees cast too much shade on the course’s grass, said Scott Hampton, director of UF Golf Courses.
The committee voted unanimously to recommend the almost 80-foot-tall pines be removed. Curtis Reynolds, UF’s vice president for Business Affairs, accepted their recommendation March 31.
UF spokeswoman Janine Sikes said on Thursday that UF put its plans to cut down the trees on hold.
But Tanzer and her husband, Rod McGalliard, are still fighting for the trees. The couple lives in Golfview, a neighborhood
adjacent to the bat houses, the conservation area and the golf course.
McGalliard, a UF alumnus, said the press release UF sent out doesn’t explicitly state the trees won’t be removed. Instead, it reads that the pines won’t be removed unless they are found to be diseased.
“I’ve seen a lot of dead and dying and diseased pine trees in my life,” McGalliard, 67, said, adding these trees aren’t sick enough to remove.
McGalliard said it’s another excuse to cut down the pines, as possible diseases weren’t among the reasons the course originally listed to the committee.
He said Reynolds called him and made it seem like cutting the pines down was out of the question and said UF’s inconsistencies between the press release and his phone conversation with Reynolds are “just as phony as a $3 bill.”
The ecology of the area is Tanzer’s main concern.
“(The trees) add a layer of shade and protection — and even wind protection in the case of storms — that nothing else adds, and so it’s important for the diversity of the whole woodland to keep them,” she said.
The area contains a natural lake and a stream that connects to Lake Alice when it rains, Tanzer said. Additionally, the stream injects into the aquifer, making it “significant in its own right.” Tanzer said she feels UF is “relinquishing its responsibility and letting the golf course run a conservation area.”
UF has to balance several issues, Sikes said, including managing an NCAA golf course and the woods. She said UF has a long history of working with Golfview residents, and not announcing their previous plans to cut down the trees was an oversight.
“We strive to be a good neighbor for those who live adjacent to us,” Sikes said.
The course probably won’t replace the seventh green’s Ultradwarf grass with something more shade-tolerant and fungus-resistant, said Denver Parler, an assistant director of communications at the UAA.
“We want to maintain consistency,” Parler said.
The trees that were to be removed were known to be diseased, he said. The UAA reached out to arborists to evaluate the trees last week. There are no deadlines for when one would be hired, Parler said.
However, UF isn’t evaluating all old trees on campus, even though many could be diseased, said Jason Smith, a UF forest pathology professor.
“Nobody’s really making an effort to inspect those trees,” he said.
Because of their age, it’s likely the pines in Bat House Woods are infected, Smith said.
But “that doesn’t mean they can’t be around for several more decades and serve a lot of good,” he said.
UF needs a clear plan detailing how to manage conservation areas, Smith said. They could also hire an arborist, which UF hasn’t had in almost a decade.
If the trees are cut, mitigation money would likely be used to remove invasive plants from the area, said Gail Hansen, the Lakes, Vegetation and Landscaping Committee chair.
But McGalliard and Tanzer said they could raise enough money in a weekend to match mitigation funds, and they would get volunteers to clear out nonnative plants.
“We want the golf course to be successful,” Tanzer said. “We just want them to stay on the golf course.”
[A version of this story ran on page 1 on 6/16/15]
Kim Tanzer, a Golfview resident, poses for a photo Sunday while holding a watercolor painting of the loblolly pines that UF is considering cutting down.
