If you notice your neighbor is suddenly planting five brand new palm trees, you might want to give BTB a call. That's because those trees were stolen from the median along the Phillip Goldson Highway. Yes - someone - or multiple persons - drove onto the highway last night and dug up newly planted palm trees and just took them.
These trees are a part of BTB's city beautification project. They've embarked on renovating several areas of the city. You might have noticed some new plants by Berger Field, and in February, we showed you the new additions to Constitution Park.
But according to consultant, Elena Usher, at every stop for this project, vandals have destroyed what they recently erected. Today she expressed her frustration.
Elena Usher, Consultant, BTB's City Beautification Project
"We have tried to do all that we could to make it really pretty for the city but we have been having a very bad problem which is the theft of the plants. As soon as we lay some of them down, tomorrow morning when we go back, they're gone. This project on the northern road, this is all palms we're  going to do and so far it has been going good until last night, five of the palms have been stolen. everywhere we work, this has happened. In Constitution Park, BTB put a little maintenance hut in the park, the doors and the windows were taken. Things like that happen. There was another part of the boulevard where we put down, like today we would put down 114 and tomorrow we go back to water and 89 of them are gone. Another problem is if they don't steal it, they just destroy the plants. They just root them out and leave them there or they just stand on it or they just pass through it, people just don't have any respect or any care for it, it makes me wonder, what kind of a society we're living in? Is it that they have lived, or we have lived in such an ugly environment that when we see something really nice we want to revert to it being ugly."
"The actual doing is not a problem, it's just the frustration of having to go back and do it and believing that the people will appreciate it, it's heartbreaking, it's disheartening. The government is here trying to make the place look pretty, trying to attract tourists, when people come in they see that our place is nice and pretty, but if we have all these vandals living among us it's not going to happen and then people will say, oh the government does nothing, but here is a good example of them trying to do something and the people just destroying."
"There's a lot of effort in doing it, to take it out, and maybe the way they take it out is not going to survive so it's just a waste of money, time, energy, resources, everything. It's disappointing, it's disheartening."
Usher is looking at surveillance footage and is planning to get the police involved.
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