At last week’s city council meeting, Wimberley Independent School District requested the removal of four heritage trees to facilitate the additions and improvements that are part of the 2025 $135M WISD bond program.
A cluster of three trees near the proposed Auditorium addition on the Danforth Junior High campus would impede the driveway leading up to the addition. The fourth tree would impact the proposed Multi Purpose Activity Center sited between Danforth and Wimberley High School.
Senior Associate Sarah Toronjo of O’Connell Robertson & Associates, Inc., who is providing the Architecture, Engineering and Contract Administration Services for the project, spoke before the council. The request for the removal of the trees were based on studies conducted by Studio 1619 Landscape Architects of Round Rock and TreeMannSolutions, LLC Certified Arborists of Georgetown.
The TreeMannSolutions report found that the trees “exhibit significant limb damage, signs of disease and critical structural deficiencies. Given these conditions, preservation is not recommended, as the trees are likely to face accelerated decline and pose increasing safety risks to the district, athletes and students.”
The Wimberley Tree Code protects trees that are 24 inches in diameter or larger. The trees targeted for removal are Oak trees.
According to Toronjo, the architects created several scenarios to prevent removing the trees near the planned auditorium. “There was one scenario where we could have potentially avoided these trees. Unfortunately, it would have disconnected the auditorium from the junior high and placed a parking lot and drive lanes in between them, which means that our youngest students would have had to cross both of them to enter the auditorium. So for student safety considerations, having the building attached was obviously the highest priority,” she said.
The fourth tree requested for removal is a 30-inch, multi-stem Live Oak adjacent to the planned Multi Purpose Activity Center. The structure, a pavilion over turf, is designed to provide shade for athletics, bands and other functions for both the junior high and high school.
“The tree has some stem imbalance, and it would lean significantly towards the new pavilion,” Toronjo said. “Keeping it would require reducing the tree’s canopy significantly, more than 25 percent, which would put the tree at serious risk of not being able to survive the construction.”
When asked by Mayor Jim Chiles if there were plans to replace the removed trees, Toronjo said that their plans included adding 474 inches of tree mitigation at Danforth alone, to replace the number of tree inches proposed for removal.
The council voted to approve the code variance which would allow for the removal of the trees.
