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March 12, 2023 Editor, The News-Gazette: I hope all citizens of Lexington, or citizens from anywhere for that matter, who appreciated the beauty and simplicity of Jordans Point Park, will go take a walk around it now to view the destruction and environmental degradation wrought by the public works department. What the department’s intention was is indecipherable, and I don’t know who is ultimately responsible, but I have spoken with several people familiar with the situation and this is what I have learned: Apparently, a few weeks ago, public works was hot to make “improvements” at the park. The city arborist, Celia Raney, provided them with a work plan which included a surgical removal of only invasive species and “widow maker” limbs, and a prohibition on the cutting of any trees more than 4 inches in diameter. Public works chose to do the work while Ms. Raney was indisposed and out of town, and they completely ignored her work plan. They cut down numerous large, native trees. They clear-cut and dozed off the steep bank beside the boat ramp, and completely destroyed and leveled a thousand square feet of perfectly healthy, well-vegetated riparian buffer down in the flood plain, ostensibly to put in a picnic table.
No small part of this blunder is its aesthetic damage. A man I met there the other day described it succinctly. I was walking around, staring in disbelief at the destruction. He’d come to sit in his car and eat his lunch beside the river. He must have noticed the dazed look on my face.
“They raped it,” he said. “It was a perfectly beautiful place, and they raped it.” PHILLIP WELCH Rockbridge County
