Oakland’s City Council has voted that a Nigerian medical doctor, Matthew Bernard, and his wife will pay a fine of nearly $1m for felling 38 legally protected trees on and around their Claremont Avenue property in the United States.

A California-based media platform, KQED, reported that more than 20 residents at a public hearing on Tuesday demanded enforcement of Oakland’s tree protection laws.

They argued that the leafy canopies of the trees in the area were important for wildfire prevention, public health, and environmental equity.

Diaspora Tales reported last month that Bernard and his partner, Lynn Warner, said they removed trees from their property on an arborist’s advice.

At the hearing on Tuesday, the Nigerian medical expert told the council that the trees removed from his property nearly four years ago were “dead, dying, leaning,” or in “hazardous condition.”

The city, however, disagreed and fined Bernard and Warner $915,135.40 and placed a claim on their property that would prevent them from developing or selling the land until the fine was paid.

Defending the fine, a community tree specialist, Erys Gagnez, said, “Trees of that size are not commercially available for replacement. Even with replanting, it will take decades, even centuries, to restore the ecological and protective functions that were lost. The scale of the fine reflects this reality.”

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