Late breaking news!
Possible bad news for Turtle Bay: it has just recently come to my attention that the City of Redding is ready to hire a consulting firm to develop a Riverfront Specific Plan. The firm they will be hiring is called MIG/Populous. If the name sounds familiar, Populous was the firm that wanted to put in a massive development at Turtle Bay. This was just found in the agenda for the City Council’s February 8 meeting. We have not had a chance to verify if this is the same Populous; the coincidence is certainly concerning.
City of Redding Tree Committee
Things are coming along slowly with the City of Redding Tree Committee in recommending changes to the Redding Tree Management Ordinance. The planned February 6 Tree Committee meeting has been postponed until February 27 (at 5:30 PM at the Community Room next to the Redding City Council Chambers). There will be presentations by four individuals; two of these presentations will be from Tree Committee members Rocky Slaughter and David Ledger. The other two presentations will be from Kent Manuel, retired City Planning Manager, and Tim MacLean, Landscape Architect with SDS Engineering. These presentation will give the committee a wide diversity of opinion on tree ordinance needs.
Westside Trails restoration work
BLM ecologists Laura Brodhead and Brooke Thomas will be leading a short walk-and-talk field trip on the Westside Trail on Saturday, February 25, at 9 AM to discuss BLM’s Carr Fire restoration work in the area and the results they expect to get. Contract crews initially removed almost all vegetation, including that in the riparian areas, but Brooke and Laura were able to put a stop to that and reduce the shrub removal. Laura was a previous president of the Shasta Chapter CNPS, and both ecologists are concerned about protecting the land they oversee. They will discuss the tradeoffs between fire hazard management and habitat preservation.
Details about the Tree Committee and the Westside Trails restoration work, as well as other important conservation issues and work by Shasta Environmental Alliance (SEA), can be found in SEA’s February 2023 newsletter.
~David Ledger, Conservation Chair