Commanders Promise to Preserve Some of RFK Stadium’s Heritage Trees
While the D.C. Council failed to enshrine those protections into law, the Commanders have pledged to save the majority of the towering oak and elm trees on the 180-acre site.
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This story is part of Hola Cultura’s investigative series “The Shade Gap.” The series is supported with funds from SpotlightDC with reporting by participants in Hola Cultura’s Storytelling Program for Experiential Learning and copublished with the Washington City Paper. The story was written by Marina Caraballo and Francisco Rordriguez and edited by Christine MacDonald, Hola Cultura’s executive director and editor.
When the Washington Commanders return to Northeast D.C. in a few years, at least some of the towering old heritage trees that have shaded the site for decades may still be there—the unlikely beneficiaries of more than a month of work by local activists.
In a Sept. 17 letter to the D.C. Council, the Commanders committed to saving an unspecified number of the estimated 31 heritage trees currently on the development site.
“We intend to protect as many of the Heritage Trees as possible, including all of the trees in the Festival Plaza,” according to the letter signed by Mark Clouse, the team’s president.
Clouse goes on to say the Commanders “recognize the sensitive location of the RFK Campus within the Anacostia River Watershed,” and promises to work collaboratively to protect Anacostia Commons riparian area that covers 30 acres of the 180-acre site that the Commanders plan to transform into a new mixed-use development with the stadium at its core.
The D.C. Council declined activist demands to remove controversial exemptions to D.C.’s tree protection laws before passing the legislation on Sept. 17. But the Commanders’ pledge gives environmentalists something to show for their work over the past month. The team hasn’t said how many trees they will save, and there is no force of law behind their commitment, leaving some tree advocates skeptical.
“Three years from now, let’s see what happens,” says Chris Weiss, executive director of the DC Environmental Network. “I’m not impressed by that Commanders letter. … The Commanders are not environmentalists. They’re about making profit.”
A coalition of more than 30 local organizations scrambled into action during the final weeks of summer to push for more environmental and affordable housing safeguards before the Council cast its final vote on the stadium deal last week. Nearly all of those efforts failed before the bill passed by a final 11-2 vote.
Casey Trees, the nonprofit tree-planting organization that launched a petition to save the heritage trees around the RFK campus, says it welcomes the football team’s pledge to protect “the majority of the heritage trees,” adding that “we are encouraged by their public commitment to minimize tree loss across the development.”
While it praised the Commanders, Casey Trees was more critical of the Council for failing to make other changes to Mayor Muriel Bowser’s original legislation. In particular, the nonprofit rebuked the Council for retaining exemptions to the District’s tree preservation law that multiple experts have warned will weaken heritage tree protections. Those exemptions could make it harder for D.C. to continue expanding the city’s tree canopy.
As part of the Tree Canopy Protection Amendment Act of 2016, the city considers any tree with a circumference of 100 inches or more to be a heritage tree, which are forbidden from removal by any “person or entity, including the District government,” without a permit from the mayor. Removing these trees usually includes a hefty fine of no less than $30,000, or $300 for each inch of trunk circumference. But under the legislation that passed Sept. 17, the Commanders will pay just $55 per inch of circumference for any heritage tree they remove.
The team reiterated in its letter a pledge to keep 30 percent of the site as open space, but the legislation does not specify that it must be natural and publicly accessible.
The RFK campus, where the team played before it moved to Landover, and where the new stadium and development will be built, sits on a bend in the Anacostia River—an area that sees some of the worst flooding problems in D.C., as well as urban heat islands that push temperatures higher in that part of the city.
D.C. environmentalists and Ward 7 community groups expressed concern that removing dozens of pin oak, willow oak, swamp white oak, and elm heritage trees would worsen those conditions. The legislation also greenlights removal of more than 100 special trees, the D.C. government’s definition of trees measuring between 44 to 99.9 inches in circumference that require a permit and fee prior to removal.
While construction of the new publicly funded stadium has citywide support, according to a Washington Post poll, dozens of organizations sprung into action following the bill’s first reading on Aug. 1, orchestrating strategy meetings, protests, and visits to councilmember offices before the final reading and vote on Sept. 17.
The Kingman Park RFK Future Task Force met Sept. 14 under the towering heritage trees in a final push to highlight neighborhood concerns they felt some councilmembers were not open to considering, according to Sarah Miller, a local resident who became involved with the task force through serving on the Friends of Kingman Park civic association’s board.
While the RFK stadium site may be the Commanders’ spiritual home, “this is our actual home, and we actually have to live here, so it would be great if all the members of the Council were open to hearing what we had to say,” Miller told Hola Cultura before the vote. Task force members had already met with a representative from the Commanders, she says, and will continue pushing to ensure the community’s needs are heard during redevelopment.
“They’ve committed to continuing being in communication with us and coming to some of our Friends of Kingman Park community meetings,” Miller says. “We certainly want to foster that relationship. Like I said, we want to be good neighbors to them. … We’re going to continue to hold these events and get more folks out here enjoying the space that we have and continue making our community stronger.”
View all the stories in “The Shade Gap” series.
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