Maybe we’ll forget about those RIH trees

SATURDAY MORNING EDITORIAL — It was a sad day in 2013 when the chainsaws took down those big old heritage trees in front of Royal Inland Hospital.

People had fought for those trees years before, refusing to let them be destroyed for a parkade.

It was almost as sad the day the bulldozers moved in and tore up the grass and started hauling away the dirt. It took months to do it, but the landscape is now changed and soon construction of a new clinical services building will begin.

That building is part of the dauntingly expensive master site plan that will see RIH upgraded in stages that will take years to complete.

It’s much more palatable than the unattractive parkade that was once proposed for the site and that people fought so hard to stop from happening when they wanted the trees more.

The new clinical services building — which will include 350 parking stalls, a nice lobby and space for several medical programs — looks very good on paper. It was announced Friday that Bird Construction will take the concept and put the finishing touches on design, then build it.

Sometime in the next couple of months, yet another phase in the transformation of RIH will kick in as construction starts.

By the time it’s all done, the trees and the grass will be but a memory, but we’ll have improved medical services and more places to park our cars when we need to access them.

Maybe this is one of those inevitable marches of progress, and maybe we’ll all be glad for it.

But those trees….