Logging sparks 'neighborhood revolt'

Riverbend mobile homeowners protest removal of more than 100 trees, many taller then 40 feet -

Please, please, please, PLEASE dont cut down my pine tree. I just want to be able to sit on my deck and enjoy it till I croak. I love my pine tree. 🙁 I never ask anyone for anything. I just want my beloved pine.

So wrote Riverbend Mobile Home Park community member Gabrielle St. John, 65, in a sign she tied to a 40-foot-tall Douglas fir when chainsaws began passing by her home along Highway 212/224 this month to chop down more than 100 trees. The tree in front of her house is technically not hers; the manufactured-home park owns all the property and leases it to people with mobile homes.

Riverbend is able to legally remove 159 trees throughout the manufactured-home park that has about 200 families because the trees were deemed unhealthy or because they pose a concern for safety due to large limb failures that could result in property damage in the future. Many of the trees were between 20 and 50 feet tall.

No formal permit was required because the trees were either unregulated or exempt from current Clackamas County regulations. County staff concluded there were no previous or underlying landscaping plans or requirements for the manufactured-home park, so the only trees of concern to the county were 12 Doug firs proposed to be removed within the environmentally sensitive areas within the Clackamas Rivers Habitat Conservation Area (HCA).

Because arborist Jon Poteet of Northwest Tree Specialists identified that those trees pose a concern for safety due to recent large limb failures that resulted in property damage, removal of those trees constitutes an Exempt Use within the HCA per Ordinance Subsection 706.04(P), wrote senior planner Steve Hanschka, a certified floodplain manager for the county.

Riverbend Mobile Home Community is managed by Cal-Am Properties, where a representative declined to comment for this story. According to Cal-Ams arborists report submitted to Clackamas County, the management company proposed to mitigate for the tree removal by planting six 6-foot-tall Western red cedars and six 6-foot-tall Douglas firs in the northeast sector of the site, near the Clackamas River.

Although some local residents were happy with the removal of problematic trees, St. John and her neighbor, Korin Richards, saw themselves as part of a neighborhood revolt. Several other Riverbend residents tied or chained signs to trees near their homes after Cal-Am sent out a 24-Hour Notice of Intent to Enter Upon Premises on Dec. 1 for trimming and/or removing trees before Dec. 30.

They advertise community, but theres no communication, and everyone Ive talked with moved here because of the trees, Richards said. Our home values have gone down, theres more sound from the highway, the air quality is going to be terrible, and this is not being handled well. Even if its legal, I dont think its right, and I think we have to work so this doesnt happen in the future.

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Logging sparks 'neighborhood revolt'