Balzan residents are fuming as two landmark trees in Triq il-Wied were uprooted just days after works on the street were announced, and without any opportunity for consultation.

One of the uprooted trees can be seen in this photo provided by a Times of Malta reader.

Some 30 residents wrote to the Balzan local council after Infrastructure Minister Ian Borg announced the realignment and upgrading works on June 14, insisting construction should not go ahead without a proper consultation process.

The council wrote back that the matter could be raised at its next meeting on July 10, but residents awoke on Thursday to find uprooting works on the trees in full swing.

By Friday morning, the trees had been completely removed. 

“At the very least, we should have been given the opportunity to have our voices heard,” Simone Vella Lenicker, one of the residents, told the Times of Malta.

“It’s just terrible. We’ve known these trees there all our lives. It’s not just a sentimental thing: they have their meaning but they also had environmental importance, and they could have been incorporated into the new plans.”

Triq il-Wied is set to get a long-awaited upgrade, planned to be completed by the end of summer, including the complete reconstruction of the road and the building of 1.2 kilometres of pavement.

The uprooted trees are planned to be relocated to a public garden a few streets away, in an area between Triq Bosio and Triq l-Għerusija.

Balzan mayor Ian Spiteri could not be reached for further comment yesterday.

He had said the council appointed a horticultural expert to oversee the relocation and was informed the two ficus trees had a 95 per cent chance of survival.

The mayor also said the council had been shown the Planning Authority’s policy on such roads and was told that realignment was necessary, as a result of which the trees would have ended up in the middle of a carriageway.

He added that their removal was necessary to ensure that pavements could be installed and that the new road infrastructure was not further damaged by the roots.

The realignment will also necessitate the expropriation of part of a private car park, on which works have already taken place.

The upgrade is intended to support the forthcoming Central Link Project, a €55 million plan to upgrade the arterial thoroughfare between Saqqajja Hill in Rabat and the Mrieħel bypass.

That project has itself attracted a barrage of criticism in recent days after plans to uproot numerous mature Aleppo pine trees from along the so-called Rabat Road.  Revised plans foresee the uprooting of 15 trees – more than 100 fewer than originally proposed - and the planting of hundreds more. Experts have said the transplanted trees have little chance of surviving the move.