ENCINITAS -- With a swift swipe of a chain saw, the Tipuana tipu tree that a tree-sitter tried to save for a week in Orpheus Park came down with a crash Monday morning.

The tree-sitter, Andrew Watkins, 27, wasn't around to witness the destruction.

He left his leafy perch during Friday's rainstorm after telling his supporters that he had received a phone call from the city's mayor guaranteeing the tree's survival.

That phone call never happened, the city's mayor said Monday.

"I've had no communication with the guy," Mayor Maggie Houlihan said, adding that she didn't believe anyone else at the city offered such a guarantee. "I know of no correspondence."

When a reporter informed Watkins of this statement, Watkins swore that he had received a call from someone who sounded official.

"They even said the treehouse was going to stay and it was going to be an ongoing community monument," he said in a cell phone interview, adding that the woman didn't give her name and that he no longer had the number in the call log of his cell phone.

Watkins, who said he runs an organic farming group and doesn't have a fixed address, said there was nothing he could do to save the tree from the chain saw Monday morning because he was in Santa Barbara and had no money to get back.

His fight to save the tipu began after city officials marked for removal 11 trees in the park on Orpheus Avenue, saying they were blocking the ocean views of residents in the Coast Point condominiums next door.

The condo owners have a view-protection agreement with the city, according to the city's parks and recreation director.

Hours after Watkins built a plywood platform in the tipu tree and climbed aboard Jan. 30, the city took out the 10 other trees.

The tipu tree was left alone, but city officials emphasized at the time that they were still planning to remove it -- they were just waiting for Watkins to give up and leave.

The weather was mild for the first few days of Watkins' protest, but turned cold and rainy late last week.

On Monday morning, between breaks in the storm clouds, a city-hired crew sliced into the tree's trunk.

Then, workers cut off the branches and turned the tree into mulch.

By 10 a.m., there was nothing left of the tree except a small scattering of sawdust and a stump.

Beside the stump rested the remains of the weeklong tree-sit. Blankets, sheets of plywood and other items, including some recently donated fresh fruit, were jumbled together in the heap.

A few faded, save-the-tree signs made by schoolchildren fluttered in the breeze.

On a hillside above the stump, park neighbors looked over the scene and shook their heads.

Steve Meiche, a Los Angeles firefighter who lives across the street from the park, said he thought the city could have handled the situation better.

He said city officials should have held meetings to get a consensus from the community about how to handle the tree problem rather than firing up the chain saws.

"This issue goes beyond the tree thing," he said, mentioning a series of projects in which he said the city failed to work with neighborhood residents to create solutions the community could support.

Liz Cummins, who lives in the condominium complex that had the ocean view issue with the park, agreed.

She said many people in the condo complex wanted better pruning of the trees rather than having them cut down.

The city's parks and recreation director, Chris Hazeltine, said that any tree removal tends to be a sensitive topic in Encinitas, but that he hadn't expected this project to generate a full-scale protest complete with a tree-sitter.

The tipu tree isn't native to the area, and the one in Orpheus Park was young -- less than 20 years old and not more than 25 feet tall.

While the park's trees had been pruned regularly in the past, they were getting too big to easily handle, Hazeltine said.

Orpheus Avenue-area residents aren't the only people upset with the way the city's leaders handled the situation.

An attorney with the Coast Law Group, which focuses on environmental legal issues, has informed the city that he believes a series of recent City Council e-mails related to the tree's removal violate the state's public meeting act.

In those e-mails, Councilmen James Bond, Jerome Stocks and Dan Dalager praised the city's mayor, saying they're glad Houlihan supported the city staff decision to remove the tree and stayed out of the public controversy.

The councilmen were not pleased with Councilwoman Teresa Barth, who publicly said that she thinks the city should have saved the park's trees.

In a letter to the city dated Friday, Coast Law Group attorney Marco Gonzalez said that the e-mails indicate that the council members were attempting to develop a course of action related to the tree situation -- something that's allowed only in a public meeting setting.

"It's fairly cut and dried from where I sit," he said Monday.

He added that he has informally heard from some city leaders since he sent the letter and hopes his threat of legal action pushes the city to take a hard look at how it handles e-mail communication in the future.