Official to Pay Unofficial Visit to Santa Clarita Valley Oak

California’s new secretary of environmental protection is planning to make an unofficial visit Saturday to the Old Glory oak tree, which is scheduled to be moved by the end of the month.

Terry Tamminen will make the trip to get a good look at the Santa Clarita Valley tree that gained notoriety when an activist sat inside it for 71 days in an attempt to prevent a developer from cutting it down.

The developer, John Laing Homes, eventually decided to move the tree to a new site, but environmentalists contend that moving the tree will kill it.

On Thursday, Bill Rattazzi, a regional president for Laing Homes, said workers had completed the complicated process of fully boxing the tree’s root structure.

He said the tree would be towed to its new location in a nearby plot in about two weeks.

John Quigley, the activist who lived in the tree in late 2002 and early 2003, said in a statement Thursday that the company “rushed the cutting and boxing of Old Glory” to prevent state officials from intervening in the matter.

But the plans to move the tree follow a timeline that Laing Homes officials had laid out in October.

Michele St. Martin, a spokeswoman for the California Environmental Protection Agency, emphasized that Tamminen was “going down there on his own. It’s not official state business whatsoever.”