This piece also appeared as an editorial in the Aug. 29, 2024, issue of Times of San Diego.
Mira Mesa residents have been waiting decades for a new swimming pool and upgrades to their Mira Mesa Community Park — but why can’t the city make those valuable upgrades without destroying dozens upon dozens of mature, environmentally valuable trees?
It may be our city’s largest community by population, but Mira Mesa seldom gets the love, attention, or respect from City Hall it merits, especially given its size and economic contributions.
Mira Mesans have become accustomed to dilapidated roads, lane realignment experiments, no foreseeable trolley access, and a dismissive city bureaucracy that recently forced an unrealistic and unworkable community plan onto the area with barely performative levels of attention paid to residential concerns and input.
One of the few bright spots for residents, at least as far as their dealings with the city are concerned, has been the pending addition of the long-awaited swimming pool and related upgrades at Mira Mesa Community Park. If any city community is entitled to park upgrades — it’s Mira Mesa.
But we’ve learned the long-awaited upgrades come at an unacceptable cost. Sixty-eight mature trees that have been a source of shade, habitat, and beauty in the park for decades are now being destroyed to make way for the upgrades. What kind of bargain is this? It doesn’t matter that the trees will be “replaced” in some kind of mitigation plan. The cutting down of this small but important urban forest is an environmental and aesthetic outrage on numerous levels, and it didn’t have to happen.
If the city’s elected and appointed officials had simply explained to the community, like any leader should do, that more time was needed to better incorporate upgrades into the park’s existing footprint — mature trees and all — I’m confident there would have been a positive response. But plowing ahead without greater community buy-in was obviously an easier route for the city.
Our current city administration may talk about the benefits of San Diego’s urban tree canopy, but in that same breath enables 68 mature trees that have served the community well and provided shade for generations to be hacked down.
We’re angry, but we shouldn’t be surprised. After all, this is the same city that ignored Kensington residents who fought for years to protect a line of mature and beloved pepper trees along Marlborough Ave., only to have the city cut them down as well.
If current city leadership knew anything of the efforts the Mira Mesa Recreation Council expended just to get the shade-providing “sun sails” installed in Mira Mesa Community Park northeast of the New Salem St. bend, perhaps further thought might have been given to refining the park’s upgrades to preserve its mature trees and the shade and habitat they provide(d) — and at far less cost than the human-made sun sails.
We all know a community swimming pool and other amenities requires lots of space and good access. But surely adequate space and reasonable access could have been found within the park footprint without destroying 68 trees. It is, after all, a park.
As long as we treat our mature urban forests and other green infrastructure as disposable nuisances rather than valuable assets for shade, temperature, carbon sequestration, habitat for birds and other species, and the basic aesthetics of a welcoming community space fore neighbors, this kind of short-sighted, avoidable destruction will continue.
Tommy Hough is a public lands advocate and environmental consultant. He previously served as a San Diego County planning commissioner and was the founding president of San Diego County Democrats for Environmental Action.
This piece first appeared as an editorial in the Aug. 29, 2024, issue of Times of San Diego. Photo courtesy of Lester Lee Dronick.