A healthy, 73-year-old native resident tree of South Portland was executed at the discretion of City Manager Jim Gailey on Dec. 1, 2014. When the City Council was urged to investigate by angry residents who knew about the killing, Gailey explained this act as a mercy killing of sorts. He explained that “disease and other factors” justify whether such longtime residents live or die.

What’s weirder about this incident is that this resident actively volunteered for the city full time, mostly lending labor and expertise in storm water drainage problems made worse by poor city planning spanning decades. The loss to family, to neighbors, and to the whole city of this longtime resident is devastating.

This native red maple (Acer rubrum) grew from a wild seed in 1941 to become a wide cluster of trunks straddling the official boundary between property owned in trust by the city of South Portland (to the south) and the Heffernan family (to the north) on Baltimore Street. But this tree was not diseased, as Gailey implied. Indeed, it posed nothing but benefit to the health and safety of city property and city residents. This healthy, mature tree was a natural pump for increasingly frequent floods that over-saturate the soil and run from the street toward a row of private residences.

So what “other factor” motivated this action by Gailey on the city’s behalf – an action that ultimately led to a seizure of private property in the form of the Heffernan’s unwilling sacrifice of the property-straddling tree?

An “anomaly.”

Looming at the end of Baltimore Street is Portland Pipe Line’s largely dormant Hill Street tank farm. Under the street lies the aged 42-inch pipe to Pier No. 2 in Casco Bay that receives crude oil shipments destined for Canada about once a month. This pipeline and the tank farm were built in the middle of city neighborhoods with little regard for zoning. It was war, after all, and the flow of oil fueling the Canadian war effort was under threat from Nazi U-boats in the St. Lawrence River.

But the war ended, and rather than shutting down with the war, the pipeline became an ongoing business with, as it says, a commitment to the communities it passes through and in which it considers itself a part.

At some point last fall, Portland Pipe Line obtained an excavation permit from the city to inspect “an anomaly” in the city right-of-way in front of the Heffernans’ house. No explanation was ever given as to what this “anomaly” meant and what risk to life or property (if any) it might pose. On short notice just before Thanksgiving the Heffernans were told that the tree would be removed and they would have no say in the matter. They protested to the city but the contacts there were unavailable during the holiday.

Then on Dec. 1, the first business day after Thanksgiving, 7-year-old Patrick Heffernan woke to the sight of hard-hatted pipeline officials and a tree-cutting crew guarded by four police in two squad cars who were deployed to the scene by Gailey just in case anyone protested. Within hours, this majestic link between soil and sky and central gathering place for the neighborhood’s children became an unsightly stump.

And the “anomaly?” It was nothing.

Gailey’s culpability and Portland Pipe Line’s ham-handedness (to suspend suspicions about Portland Pipe Line’s intentions) lie in their seeming unawareness of the heightened sensitivity that South Portlanders feel in the aftermath of the tar sands battle that so consumed the town over the past two years. As it stands, Portland Pipe Line can deploy this word “anomaly” to excavate any of its neighborhood pipes and remove any tree – even those on adjacent property not belonging to the city or the pipeline – with no explanation, no discussion, no debate. Call it an “uber-fast-track” eminent domain takeover.

Mayor Cohen has reached out to the Heffernans to somehow make amends for the loss of the tree. But the stump remains a powerful symbol of how this manager-led city government relates to residents, how corporate neighbor treats resident neighbor, and how we all relate to nature in a postwar suburban setting.

Eben Rose, a member of Protect South Portland, lives in South Portland.