The DNC Supports Deforestation!!

The Democratic National Convention is scheduled to fuck up...errrr.. hit Denver in late August of this year. As part of the city-wide cleanup, they're doing random things like filling potholes, cleansing the bums and other minor touch-ups.

One of these touch-ups was apparently chopping down roughly 50 trees in front of the Pepsi Center, where the event will be held. The Pepsi Center sits on the north side of Auraria Parkway, which has been a major artery into downtown Denver for almost 20 years now. In the middle of Auraria Parkway, for all of that time, has been a traffic island full of trees, strecthing roughly 200 feet. The island itself is about five feet wide and housed these trees well. They had a good effect on the otherwise dismal expanse of asphalt. They didn't make a mess, either.

But as of Monday, March 31, the city has been systematically chopping down all of them and making the traffic island as bare as Kurt Angle's dome. There was no reason for this, at all. Other than the fact that a TV camera crew can no stand on the island and provide a better profile shot of the Pepsi Center. Or maybe they cited "security concerns" and were worried that the EvilDoers of the World (tm George Bush) could hide in these trees and perpetarte Evil Deeds on our witless politicians.

If anything, cutting down these trees will increase traffic problems. The trees were quite dense and for the past 20 years no pedestrians could cross Auraria Parkway and wait in the traffic island. On any given morning it's not unusual to see traffic speeding into town on Auraria, doing about 50 MPH. Auraria separates the Pepsi Center from the 3-layered Auraria Campus (Communitty College of Denver, Metro State and CU-Denver). Now college kids have the opportunity to run across Auraria and fuck-up traffic.

Although I'm a registered Democrat, I'm not a tree-hugger by any means. While they looked nice, cutting down trees isn't what upsets me. What upsets me is that something that wasn't a problem was suddenly cited as such. Worse, the city is funding this worthless project, meaning that it's coming out of taxpayers' pockets.

But hey..the city's expecting to make a few million off of the DNC. Maybe they can use some of those funds to plant some new saplings in the Auraria Parkway traffic island. *Fart*