Eight little trees in Auke Bay have caused a big fuss for the city’s Docks and Harbors Department. Now, the department has a plan to end the sapling squabble.
About two weeks ago, the city planted a few dozen young Littleleaf Linden trees — none taller than about 10 feet — around the perimeter of the newly constructed Statter Harbor parking lot. Eight of those trees stood directly across Glacier Highway from the Squires Building, a mixed-use building housing eight businesses and eight residences.
Though the trees are small right now, they will eventually grow to be between 20 and 30 feet tall, and several businesses in the Squires Building are worried that the trees will block their views of the harbor.
“They’ll hurt the businesses that are there,” Don Howell, the building’s owner, told the Empire in a phone interview Thursday. “The view is a big draw for them. It’s the reason the building was built there.”
The building was built in the 1950s as a hardware store with some upstairs apartments. It was renovated and expanded several times throughout the ‘80s. Howell, who bought the building in 1996, said that it hasn’t changed much since then; it hasn’t needed to. Its view of the harbor is enough to attract people from all over town to the building’s several restaurants, such as Squirez Bar, Gonzo and Chan’s Thai Kitchen.
Shayla Weeks, owner of Squirez Bar, told the Empire Thursday that she is worried that the trees will one day block her second-story view of the harbor. Squirez Bar recently began a campaign to “Save the View,” asking patrons to “contact your local officials and let them know how you feel about the new trees.”
“It’s very disappointing,” Weeks said of the Statter Harbor parking lot landscaping. “We rely on those views. We have a lot of people coming here from downtown and all over to enjoy the view.”
Mike Allen has been frequenting Squirez Bar for the past 16 years. Allen, a former commercial fisher and ferry worker, said he likes to go the bar because he likes to “watch the comings and goings of the boats.” After the city planted the trees, Allen was one of the first people to join the Save the View campaign.
“It would be nice to give the city a chance to do something about it instead of just talking about the trees at the bar,” he said.
The ideal compromise — according to Allen, Weeks and Howell — would be for the city to relocated the eight trees directly in front of the Squires Building. Ideally, some of the trees closer to the water that could also impact the view from the building would be moved, too.
After about 10 days of fielding grievances about the greenery, the city has decided to comply. Gary Gillette, the Docks and Harbors Department’s port engineer, said he plans to meet with the landscape architect behind the new Statter Harbor parking lot to come up with a plan to relocate the trees and replace them with Sitka Rose bushes.
“We want to be good neighbors, and we certainly don’t certainly don’t want people to think we’re against local business,” Gillette told the Empire Thursday. “We’re going to try to make this right and make it palatable.”
Gillette said it was never his department’s plan to “create a wall of landscaping” that would block the Squires Building’s views of the harbor. In fact, the earlier versions of the parking lot plans included Red Maples instead of the much shorter Littleleaf Lindens. Red Maples grow to be 60 feet tall.
Gillette and the landscape architects working on the project picked the shorter trees to avoid impacting the view. And, according to Gillette, he didn’t have much of a choice when it came to planting the trees.
City code required him to maintain at least 10 percent of the parking lot under vegetative cover. What’s more, the city’s Planning Commission required Gillette’s department to plant trees as a part of its conditional use permit.
While the commission was discussing the permit in early 2013, several residents from the Auke Bay Towers condos, located behind the post office, requested that the city plant trees around the parking lot. Like the Squires Building’s tenants, the condo owners were worried about their view. They didn’t want to look out their windows at asphalt.
Gillette thinks that he and Chris Mertle, the parking lot’s landscape architect, can come up with a plan that will hide the parking lot from the condos and leave the harbor views for the Squires Building.
“We think we can make this work and still have some nice landscaping,” he said.
Gillette doesn’t yet know when the trees will be relocated, but he is sure “it’s going to be before they cause any blockage of views — if they ever would.”
• Contact reporter Sam DeGrave at 523-2279 or sam.degrave@juneauempire.com.
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Shayla Weeks, owner of Squirez Bar, is protesting the trees planted at the new Auke Bay harbor facility across the street from the business, saying that the trees will grow to block their waterfront view.
