It’s the story that won’t go away. Yet another landowner decides that a big, old oak tree is incompatible with house-building plans in a leafy, South Tampa neighborhood. Latest was the flap about a couple wanting to remove a 50-year old live oak over an allergy issue. Predictably enough, immediate neighbors were outraged, took their case to the Variance Review Board — and won.
But here’s the part that makes even less sense than cutting down a half-century old tree in Ballast Point, where the neighborhood association motto is “Where Grand Oaks Meet The Bay.”
Suppose the tree-cutting couple had won? Now they have to live there — amid all the other oaks and a bunch of neighbors resentful of their insensitive, oak-chopping presence among them. Welcome to the neighborhood.