Who poisoned the oak trees in this Broward neighborhood? It’s a mystery — at least for now
Dania Beach Commissioner Lauren Odman, the self-described hippy on the dais, was pushing an ordinance in December intended to protect the city’s lush and leafy oak tree hammocks when she learned about a potential hurdle. The city’s consulting arborist had recommended excluding a 10-acre tract along Stirling Road from the new law.
Worried her hard-fought campaign to make it far more difficult and expensive for landowners or developers to remove oak trees might fail, Odman accepted the recommendation.
Three months later, dozens of towering oaks that dotted that same property at 3851 Stirling Road are dead. Someone poisoned them with a powerful herbicide. Most remain upright but they’re nearly naked and some heavy branches have snapped and fallen to the ground. It’s almost as if a leafy piece of South Florida morphed into a barren northern winter landscape.
Who poisoned the oaks remains a mystery — at least for now.
The city says it doesn’t know and one of the owners of BSD Capital LLC, which bought it in December for $5 million, told the city he has no clue.
In adjacent Harger Hills Oak Hammock, one of three small subdivisions the law was created to help protect, one resident reported seeing two men pouring something near the trees in February. When asked what they were doing, this was the answer: Fertilizing. Soil samples later tested by Broward County inspectors found triclopyr butoxyethyl, an herbicide used to control woody plants.
The resident took pictures of the men but no one has identified the culprits yet. Some residents are frustrated and furious.
“I mean they just poisoned almost 10 acres of trees. And they told the neighbors they were fertilizing them,” said Stephanie Jofe, a resident of Harger Hills who contacted the Herald about the mystery. “This is so horrible.”
Assistant City Attorney Eve Boutsis said poisoning the trees is illegal. With no one having definitively identified the perpetrators, Dania Beach cited BSD Capital and a hearing before a magistrate is set for May 13. The maximum fine permitted is $500 per tree. If the property had not been excluded from the oak preservation area, the fine could have been 10 times higher.
The city passed the ordinance in response to a new state law that took away the rights of local municipalities to mitigate tree removal. Under the new state provision, all that is needed to remove an oak tree is for an arborist or an architect to say it’s dangerous. Dangerous is not defined but a towering dead oak would seem to fit that description.
The issue was controversial in the city. While some residents want to preserve the leafy charm of the ancient hammocks, others say the ordinance infringed on the property rights of owners.
Odman, the commissioner who pushed the city’s oak protection law, is upset.
“If it was up to me, I’d protect all the trees,” she said. “I negotiated the best deal I could.”
Boutsis said there were three main reasons why the property was excluded from the tree ordinance: It’s adjacent to a Florida Power & Light powerline corridor, where the utility company could potentially seek tree removal or trimming. It also wasn’t directly connected to the three protected hammock subdivisions targeted for protection. And Rod Feiner, an attorney representing the new property owner, also attended hearings before the vote and asked that the property be excluded.
Sharon Sharaby, a prominent Dania Beach developer and one of the owners of BSD Capital, said he has no clue who poisoned the trees on his property.
“Somebody doused the trees. It was a terrorist act,” he said.
The poisoning appears to have taken place in broad daylight on the morning of Feb. 2 when two men showed up on a flatbed truck and poured something from what looked like plastic gas tanks in three-foot rings around the base of the trees, neighbors say. One of the men was wearing a long-sleeved blue shirt and blue jeans. A resident took pictures. It was suspicious enough that police were called, but the men left before they arrived.
Boutsis said city workers visited the property after residents notified them, but no one had managed to get a picture of the truck’s license plate. After being cited initially, the property owner installed cameras and no trespassing signs.
The 10-acre tract is unassuming from its relatively narrow frontage on Stirling Road, a few miles west of I-95, and it’s clear not much has been done on it in years. A ramshackle, 1,300-square-foot home badly in need of a paint job sits at its entrance, with a roof and old hurricane shutters that could use updates. It’s a home that currently contrasts sharply with the larger, more upscale Harger Hills homes, where 4,000 square feet on a third of an acre fetches upwards of $1 million. The tract also has nearly 10 undeveloped acres in a long narrowish lot behind the home.
According to Broward County property records, there has been a flurry of recent real estate activity on the tract. The property’s trustee sold it to a man named Aryeh Zev Sipper for $2 million. That deed was recorded on Dec. 1. A day later, another deed was recorded in Broward for the same property, with a new sale price jumping to $5 million.
Sipper sold the home and the land to Sharaby’s firm, BSD Capital. The developer who owns Koosh Jewelers in Dania Beach also has plans to build a Kosher hotel a few blocks away on State Road 7 and just across the street from the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. Some nearby neighborhoods are popular with Orthodox Jewish families.
For some residents, the concern goes beyond the trees. They worry about a new cluster of McMansions in a community that now boasts open space and lots of tree cover, or perhaps some sort of other more intensive development that would bring more traffic into their quiet niche of Dania Beach.
The tract’s future is also unclear for now.
Dania Beach Senior Planner Anne Christine Carrie said at the present, there are no plans for it filed with the city. It’s zoned for single-family estates but a person familiar with the property said someone recently visited the zoning office to inquire about what could be built there.
Asked about development plans, Sharaby said he hadn’t yet decided.
“It’s a beautiful piece of property. There aren’t many left like this in the area,” he said. “We love the area. It’s our backyard and we want to be part of the progress. God willing, in the near future, we will come up with a plan that will suit everybody.”
This story was originally published April 15, 2021 at 7:00 AM.
