A Sorrowful Farewell to the Oak Tree at SLO Repertory Theatre
Jarrod Zinn
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (KEYT) – There’s disappointment in the San Luis Obispo community as a large, historic oak tree is declared “unsalvageable.”
This is linked to the SLO Repertory Theatre’s development project.
This decision was made slowly and reluctantly from all parties.
It started as long ago as the early 1990s, with direction from SLO City Council to SLO Repertory Theatre to pursue construction of a new state-of-the-art facility downtown, here in the center of what is now dubbed the Cultural Arts District.
From the very beginning of the project, directors of SLO Rep and City Management say they have prioritized the preservation of a nearly 100-year-old oak tree.
“We should have had procedures in place at that time to look at a tree like this more in advance,” SLO City Council member Michael Boswell said during February’s monthly meeting. “We did not. That’s unfortunate.”
SLO Rep’s directors say the oak tree is one of the main reasons they haven’t planned their groundbreaking, as they’ve been making every effort to incorporate the tree into the new building’s design.
“SLO Rep began the design process for this building 14 years ago in 2012,” SLO Rep’s artistic director Kevin Harris said at the February meeting. “Since then, that project is undergone three major design revisions. Every version of the building has been intentionally designed around it.”
When the Cultural Arts District Parking Structure was completed, SLO Rep and the City hired separate arborists to study the tree’s health, who determined that the root structure extends much further than anticipated and has already been damaged.
“We were dumbfounded when he reported the extent of the damage already done to the tree’s critical root structure, and his professional conclusion that in its current condition, the tree was very unlikely to survive,” said Harris.
So the City Council was left with the decision of saving the tree or building the new theater.
“This tree would have qualified for either a heritage tree or a significant tree,” city council member Jan Howell Marx said at February’s meeting. “And I really sympathize with SLO Rep’s situation and I’m a big supporter of SLO Rep. But I feel that the city really is responsible. The city failed.”
The city’s 4-1 vote in February yielded the decision to allow SLO Rep to remove the tree and build the theater, shocking local residents.
“I had no problem with putting a nice theater in here, good for the community,” says Bruce Judson, who lives in San Luis Obispo. “As long as the tree was there. But now they’ve decided to put it in a theater and remove the tree, that’s—to me, that’s like a different story.”
Directors at SLO Rep have sent us the following statement:
“SLO REP understands and shares the community’s affection for this beautiful oak tree. Our new theatre was designed to incorporate and preserve the tree as a prominent feature of the site. After learning last summer that the tree had already sustained significant damage to its critical root structure, SLO REP worked closely with the City, independent arborists, and our project team to explore every feasible option for its preservation. We were genuinely saddened to learn that there is virtually no way to adapt the project and ensure the tree’s survival during construction. Following extensive review, the City Council agreed that SLO REP had made every reasonable effort to preserve the tree and they approved its removal. This is not the outcome we had hoped for, and we share the community’s disappointment at this loss.”
The theater company’s directors say they do not yet have any official dates planned for either the tree’s removal nor the groundbreaking for the new building.
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