Palouse Mall: business as usual

[Bill London <london@moscow.com>]

    I certainly agree with the recommendation that everyone check out
the Palouse Mall's website (http://www.palousemall.com) and their
description of the landscaping they want along the Moscow-Pullman
Highway there.
    The website is interesting both for what it does not show and what
it does reveal.
    The diagrams and landscapes do not show what the plantings will look
like from the highway.  The real effect of this planting scheme is not
clear.
    However, the mall's spin-doctors who created the explanation
accompanying the diagrams were very clear in their bias.  The mature
trees and nice-sized shrubs that survived the mall's Sunday morning raid
last year, and are growing now in the roadside strip, are described as
"the aging landscape" and "a worn out landscape."
    They do not call those plantings "mature" or certainly not
"attractive"--somehow those nice trees and the bushes there are just
"worn out."
    It's still the Mall's same old plan to replace nice decent-sized
plants with little spindly ones--and I sure hope that Moscow's city
council has the backbone to say no to this latest example of Palouse
Mall deception.
BL