Developer accused of dumping stuff in ocean in Keys after Irma. Feds say he broke the law

A Coral Springs developer was charged this week with dumping solid waste into the water off Islamorada in the Florida Keys after Hurricane Irma in September 2017.

An Islamorada Village councilman said the developer, Bonefish Holdings, LLC, “blatantly cleared the property post Irma.” This was after the developer was turned down several times since 2013 by the Islamorada Village Council for an ambitious eco lodge on the heavily wooded, oceanfront land on the Old Highway at mile marker 83.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office filed the charge against Bonefish Holdings in federal court in Key West Monday. The company faces a $500,000 fine and five years probation if convicted.

The U.S Attorney’s Office would not comment on the details of the case.

The charging document states that from Oct. 6, 2017, to Oct. 20, 2017, Bonefish Holdings dumped “dredged spoils, rock, biological material/vegetative debris, and sand from a point source into the waters of the United States.”

Reached by email Monday to comment on the charge, Bonefish’s principal, Albert Vorstman, responded that he was “off to New Zealand for a couple of weeks to catch up with family.” The only other sentence in the email was, “once the dust settles.”

Bonefish Holdings’ attorney, Joel Hirschhorn, said the company has been in negotiations with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Florida Division of Water Resource Management for almost a year. He said all parties have “finally reached a plan that is quite expensive to remediate the property.”

Vorstman, a 71-year-old urology surgeon, has owned the 8-acre property, and has been trying to develop it, since 2007.

He partnered with Fort Lauderdale architectural firm EDSA to transform the heavily wooded lot into a sprawling eco tourism resort, but the Village of Islamorada turned him down several times, beginning in 2013.

EDSA has designed similar projects around the world in places like China, the Fiji Islands, Madagascar, Egypt, Puerto Rico, Turks and Caicos and Hawaii.

Vorstman’s lot was overrun with invasive plants like the Australian pine and Brazilian pepper trees. EDSA plans at the time showed the company intended to restore the native hardwood hammock and wetlands and replant native plant species. Hotel units with a total of 49 rooms would have been built in clusters throughout the property.

The property also contains a mangrove-lined, sandy beach that EDSA planned to develop as part of the resort’s draw.

But the project stalled after several local and state regulatory hurdles, including local rezoning from residential designation. Also, new development in the Keys, including the Village of Islamorada, is tough to get passed, and is ultimately under state control because of the environmental sensitivity of the 120-mile-long island chain.

The Village Council turned down Vorstman and EDSA in 2013. He planned on resubmitting the plan in 2015, but he knew he didn’t have the three votes needed for approval, Councilman Mike Forster said. That year, the village had already approved a Publix shopping center and was reluctant to approve another large development that would impact traffic along U.S. 1.

Even if the five-member council had approved the plan, Vorstman and EDSA would then have to apply to the state to be able to build a hotel, and Florida already capped new hotel construction in Islamorada at then-current levels.

An earlier original version of this article incorrectly referred to the charge filed against the developer. The company was charged in an information filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, not in a grand jury indictment.

This story was originally published May 1, 2019 at 7:23 PM.