Around 40 citizens gathered yesterday at a protest vigil in front of Coimbra City Hall against the felling of trees on Rua Lourenço Almeida Azevedo, criticizing the municipality for a lack of dialogue on the issue.
“We have asked several times, since November 17, for contact, dialogue [with the new administration] and the response has always been silence. […] We have been filing complaints with the City Hall, we wanted explanations and we were never contacted,” Rosa Santos, one of the citizens who has participated in the movement against the felling of trees on Rua Lourenço Almeida Azevedo, due to the passage of the ‘metrobus’ (buses on a dedicated lane) along that artery in the city center, told journalists.
“The only contact from the municipality led by Ana Abrunhosa (PS/Livre/PAN) occurred ‘40 minutes before’ the executive meeting of the day 02 in which the mayor announced that in fact 20 trees would be felled—not 11, but 20—the movement counts a total of 24 removals,” Rosa Santos stated, recalling that the citizens left that meeting “shocked.”
“That meeting was not a meeting. It was a briefing, a presentation with slides in the noble hall [of the municipality],” noted the resident who lives on that street targeted by the removals and who has characteristics that make it special (the trees have the colors of the city with yellow-flowered tipuana trees and purple jacarandas).
“We have only heard silence from this new administration,” she lamented, hoping that dialogue can be “carried out from now on.”
Rosa Santos recalled that in dialogue with the previous administration there would be a proposal to Infraestruturas de Portugal (IP) to divert the metrobus canal by 1.3 meters, but while a decision was awaited, “the conduits were laid” and the diversion, at this moment, can now only be 70 centimeters.
For the future, the movement hopes that the municipality includes concerns about urban arboriculture in the works’ terms of reference.
Rosa Santos also recalled that the group had proposed a single metrobus lane with alternating circulation between the Republic Square station and the Mermaid Garden station, but it was rejected.
Miguel Dias, from the environmental organization Climação Centro, admitted that he even “harbored some hope” in the new administration for a “change in the manner of proceeding.”
“The conclusion we draw is that the only thing that actually happened was a meeting between the administration and IP and once again the will of IP’s engineers prevailed and little more,” he lamented.
Present at the vigil, Jorge Gouveia Monteiro, from the movement Citizens for Coimbra (CpC) which is part of the coalition led by Ana Abrunosa, accused the previous administration, led by José Manuel Silva, of “rigging” the process and dragging it to after the elections to a moment when the work could not be stopped.
Despite the accusation, Jorge Gouveia Monteiro apologized to the citizens, on behalf of CpC, for having learned of the felling in December and having agreed with the president of Coimbra City Hall that he would “immediately share that bad news with all movements.”
“The City Hall did not do that. I trusted that they would,” he said, offering CpC’s self-critique for having trusted “too much that the City Hall would provide that information,” which ended up being communicated only at the beginning of this month.
