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Court upholds tree-cutting permit decision By Nancy Badertscher
ATLANTA - The Garden Club of Georgia Inc. has won the latest round in its five-year battle about tree cutting along highways to the benefit of the billboard industry. The Georgia Supreme Court on Monday upheld a lower court judge's decision to issue a temporary injunction to block the state Department of Transportation from issuing tree-cutting permits along the interstates. The injunction was issued at the request of the 16,500-member Garden Club last year. The high court also took the Garden Club's side in a dispute about whether former Georgia Attorney General Michael Bowers could represent the club against the DOT, which was one of Bowers' former clients. Attorneys for Outdoor Advertising Association of Georgia Inc. and the DOT argued to the court that it was a breach of ethics for Bowers, as a private attorney, to represent the Garden Club. "It hurts the public ... This is the attorney general of Georgia, a constitutional office and a trustee of the public," senior Assistant Attorney General Ray O. Lerer argued before the Supreme Court late last year. But Bowers' attorney argued that there was no evidence that the former attorney general had any "substantial involvement" in the protracted tree-cutting battle. The Georgia General Assembly passed a law in 1998 allowing billboard owners to obtain permits for cutting trees along the highway and interstate rights of way if the trees obstruct the view of their billboards. The law was enacted after the state Supreme Court in 1996 declared a previous tree-cutting law unconstitutional, based on a 1995 lawsuit by the Garden Club. The Garden Club has another suit pending in Fulton County Superior Court that argues that trees are more valuable to the public than an unobstructed view of billboard information.
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