Because the willow oaks and their staggered placement along the Downtown Mall are such important design elements of the space, a 2005 design report commissioned by the City recommended a regime of replacing 1/3 of the trees every 10 years to "minimize risk of losing all the trees at once."

Seventeen years later, City officials are now saying that some of the trees have become a danger to pedestrians and businesses and that they plan to remove 9 of them at the beginning of next year.

"The willow oaks planted on the Mall are a treasure, conveying an immeasurable character and uniqueness to the Mall," reads the 2005 report by Wallace Roberts & Todd, an urban planning, urban design, and landscape architecture firm based in Philadelphia. "Arranged in clumps staggered from block to block down the center of the Mall, they are now about 50 feet tall.”

At the time, WRT noted that the trees were about 40 years old. Healthy willow oaks grow as much as two feet per year, the report noted, and can live for well over 100 years. Indeed, I recall sitting outside at Miller’s in the mid-1990s and the willow oaks couldn’t have been more than a foot-and-half wide. Today, you can bear hug them.

“Their removal or loss as a group would dramatically change the character and “feel” of the Mall,” said the report. “WRT recommends taking every step possible to preserve and protect these trees for as long as possible."

A later report in 2015 noted the declining health of the willow oaks and recommended removing the tight metal grates at the base of the trees and pruning the canopies to give each tree more access to sunlight.

“[The spacing] is causing all kinds of what we call ‘canopy suppression problems,’ where one tree gets a little healthier than its neighbor and it begins to dominate the space, shading out the branches on one or more sides of the tree,” Jim Urban, a landscape architect hired to brief the city Tree Commission and other stakeholders in 2017, told Charlottesville Tomorrow. Urban also questioned the idea of simply replacing certain trees after a period of time, saying the plantings would become "unbalanced" and the mall would lose its canopy look. "It’ll always look very odd,” he said. In fact, Urban said the best idea would be to remove them all and start over with new plantings, but acknowledged that it was a "draconian idea" that would likely not be popular.

The City did remove an unhealthy willow oak alongside the Omni Hotel in 2018, citing dead limbs and a decaying base that could present a risk to the hotel and pedestrians, but for the first time, the Charlottesville Tree Commission and Charlottesville Parks and Recreation are emphasizing that these trees present an immediate risk to people and businesses.

“We are not removing the trees because we want to. These are a safety hazard,” Riaan Anthony, Deputy Director of Charlottesville Parks and Recreation, told NBC29 recently. Anthony also appeared to be bracing himself for the unpopularity of that decision.

“We will be getting a lot of comments, and negative comments because they’re the downtown mall trees. We understand that 100%. We would love to keep the trees, but at what expense?” said Anthony. In fact, they are intentionally not identifying which trees are coming down because they "don't want a lot of comments."

Apparently, there is also some concern that the willow oaks could come crashing down due to a "blackish tan ooze" in the fissure in the bark of the trees that is attracting wood-boring Ambrosia Beetles. However, Steve Gaines, an Urban Forester with Parks & Rec, tells The DTM they have not found any evidence of beetle activity.

"The trees have been selected for removal due to concerns about the health and structural integrity of the individual trees," said Gaines. "As protection of life and property are paramount, the City feels it is in the best interest of the public to eliminate the risk of hazard."