Flap over limb at East Austin bar: Is the tree dead, or not?
Jim Stockbauer, a wise guy who owns a little live music bar in East Austin called the Scoot Inn, thinks he’s getting the shaft from the city for cutting a big limb off a walnut tree in his beer garden. He says he had the limb removed because the Butthole Surfers will be performing at his club on Halloween weekend. And he doesn’t want any Surfers’ fans taken out by a falling tree limb that, by my estimation, was about a foot in diameter and about 5 feet long. “I can’t afford to kill any hipsters or sorority girls,” he said. “I mean, I don’t like killing trees, but I don’t like trees killing people. That’s kind of where I draw the line with trees.” The city gave Stockbauer a whopping $1,563 ticket Friday, Oct. 8, for doing what the Planning and Development Review Department’s violations fine schedule refers to as “Removal of a Heritage Tree.” Stockbauer contended that the tree the limb was attached to was deader than Ulysses S. Grant. But after showing me a picture of the tree with some