The announcement of the felling of around twenty trees, some of which are very old, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower has aroused the ire of associations and personalities. A sling that forced the Paris City Hall to clarify the project. “No century-old tree will be cut down,” assured Emmanuel Grégoire (Socialist Party, PS), first deputy to Mayor Anne Hidalgo (PS), Saturday April 30. He sought to put out the fire lit since the middle of the week by opponents of the project to redevelop the Eiffel Tower district. Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers The redevelopment of the Eiffel Tower site gets the green light “for which the town hall “will find a solution”. For the others, “the goal is to reduce the number of felled trees as much as possible”, specifies the same source, stressing that the town hall had already “succeeded in lowering the figure” from 42 to 22. The creation of luggage storage for visitors Anne Hidalgo has made the greening of the capital a major objective of her second term, with promises to plant 170,000 additional trees or to create five “urban forests” and four new parks. In place of these trees, the “OnE” project, which aims to green and pedestrianize the world-famous perspective from the Trocadero to the “Iron Lady”, provides luggage storage for visitors and premises for employees, semi-detached buildings -buried. But also 227 new trees planted, argues the entourage of Mr. Grégoire, assistant to town planning. The project as a whole must allow the creation of 1.6 hectares of green spaces, still insists the Town Hall. A petition to denounce this slaughter Not enough to calm the opponents: a petition launched on the site change.org, and relayed by the animator Nagui, the journalist Hugo Clément or the former boss of Medef Laurence Parisot had exceeded at the end of afternoon the 30,000 signatories. “They create vegetation, but they destroy a lot of it”, deplores Philippe Khayat, member of the SOS Paris association for whom, in addition to the felled trees, two plane trees “more than a hundred years old” will be “weakened” and in the long term “ condemned” by the construction of a building “1.5 meters” from them. This project also embarrasses environmentalists, who had allowed its adoption in February in exchange for a moratorium on the repair of the Champ-de-Mars. The elected representative of Europe Ecologie-Les Verts (EELV) Aminata Niakate, who had carried this “difficult balance” for her group, still believes “that no argument holds water” to justify the luggage storage, which a site could accommodate next to. A few days earlier, the France nature environment Paris association, followed by the National Tree Monitoring Group, had denounced the felling of 77 trees in eastern Paris, Porte de Montreuil, the subject of another major redevelopment project. of town hall. The World with AFP