(The Washington Post)
East Potomac Golf Links has undergone plenty of changes since golfers first teed off there more than a century ago. Few, though, have transformed the landscape as quickly as what happened last weekend.
In a matter of hours Saturday, National Park Service crews cut down hundreds of trees across two large swaths of the federally-owned course. By Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes had ordered the cutting to stop through at least Oct. 26, finding that NPS probably violated federal environmental law and warning of damage that could not be undone.
The felled trees remain at East Potomac Golf Links. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
“Destroyed trees cannot be replaced,” she wrote.
According to court filings and testimony, crews removed hundreds of trees from Zone A, which runs from the 17th green to about midway down the 16th fairway on the blue course. They also cut 90 trees in Zone B, which stretches from behind the 12th green through the 13th hole and into the first half of the 14th. Plaintiffs say 529 trees were felled in all, though government attorneys have put the number at approximately 430.
Areas where
trees were
removed
D.C.
2,000 FEET
Unlike trees NPS removed earlier this year because they were dead, dying, hazardous or invasive, the trees targeted last weekend were healthy and noninvasive, according to NPS officials’ testimony. This week, freshly cut trunks and leafy branches remained piled between the fairways.
NPS said the removals were intended to carry out recommendations in a 2019 cultural landscape report that called for thinning trees to restore the open, links-style character envisioned when the course was designed a century ago. The agency has maintained that the work is separate from President Donald Trump’s planned overhaul of East Potomac.
Reyes was skeptical, concluding that officials raced to undertake the tree work because Trump “demands haste on his redesign,” rather than because of “some newfound zeal” to implement the old report.