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Tree uprooted, then leaders supplanted
By MAUREEN BYRNE SEMINOLE -- For 24 years, Betty Zurbrick watched the palm tree in front of her condominium grow. Each year, its 13 trunks reached higher into the sky. On Monday the palm was plucked from the ground and trucked to a Palm Beach residence. Mrs. Zurbrick and her neighbors watched in disgust as workers removed the reclinata, an impressive palm that grows in huge clumps. "This is an injustice," Mrs. Zurbrick said. "This is wrong!" By 8 p.m. Monday, the condo association president, who authorized the sale of the 28-foot tree, and treasurer were ousted from office in absentia and replaced with new board members. The 35 residents who gathered for an emergency meeting agreed to hire an attorney in hopes of pressing charges against the president. They claim that Darrell Baker exceeded his authority when he sold the palm to a landscape company for $1,000 and that the contract was invalid. Baker did not return telephone calls. Mrs. Zurbrick, an association board member and retired secretary who lives year-round at the Gardens Domicurculums, a group of six condominium complexes off Park Boulevard, noticed workers pruning the tree last week. She asked them what they were doing. She said they told her they were prepping the 25- to 30-year-old tree for its removal. Word quickly spread throughout the 48-unit complex: Someone was taking their tree. A special meeting was held Saturday night. The residents demanded to know what was going on. They said Baker told them he had sold the palm for money to repair the buildings' steps. But how could he? According to the association's bylaws, "only if a tree is diseased or a nuisance can it be removed," said Toni Witscher, a retired executive assistant who has lived at the Gardens since 1990. "This is a thing of beauty." Three of the board voted Saturday against the sale, and two, including Baker, abstained. The residents unanimously voted against selling the tree. And that was the end of it. Until Monday. That's when residents say an invoice to Baker from Sunscape Landscape Nursery appeared on the door of the community room. It said costs incurred from the breach of contract would total $4,900. Residents say the notice wasn't up long before it mysteriously disappeared. "Then all of a sudden these guys show up and start digging," said Mrs. Witscher. Much to the dismay of the residents who live on Aspen Circle, two workers from Sunscape and Ray Rice, owner of Ray's Mobile Crane Service, arrived to take the tree. About 20 residents gathered near the palm. How could they stop this, they asked each other. They called the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office. A deputy responded, but told them there wasn't anything he could do. They said that he told them it was a civil matter because it involved a contract. There was nothing they could do. Worse, trying to prevent the removal could land them in jail. Mrs. Witscher tried to get the 20 or so residents to form a ring around the tree. But she failed, and eventually some returned to their condos to escape the heat and eat lunch. But about a dozen of the neighbors stayed. After more than three hours of digging, the workers wrapped a chain around the 24,000-pound tree and hoisted it to a crane. Eleven minutes later, the palm was out of the ground and on its side. It was replaced with a spindly 7-foot crape myrtle. "I want to cry," said Mrs. Witscher, who is 66. "I just want to sit down and cry." Rice, the Tampa contractor who removed the tree, said predicaments like Monday's happen all too often. If he sympathized with the tree lovers, he said, he would be out of business. "I feel sorry for them losing their tree, but I had a job to do," Rice said Monday as he stood next to a 9-foot-wide hole where the palm once stood. So does Sunscape Landscape Nursery, said Helga Matos, a manager at the Tampa-based company that buys and sells palms. She said a contract to remove the reclinata palm and another smaller palm was signed at the end of October. Mrs. Zurbrick, 77, said the association board did approve the sale of the smaller palm for $700, but never discussed selling the larger tree. "We never even talked about it," she said. According to Ms. Matos, Sunscape received a phone call from Baker early Monday morning. She said he told her the association members had changed their minds and no longer wanted to sell the tree. She said she was under the assumption the association wanted the tree removed because it was difficult to maintain. "It seems as soon as they saw it trimmed and how nice it looked, they wanted to keep it," Ms. Matos said. After speaking with the association's attorney and learning the residents would be charged nearly $5,000 by Sunscape for work already done on the tree and for costs that would be incurred if the contract was broken, Baker told the company to pull the tree, Ms. Matos said. The workers showed up about 11 a.m., gave the board treasurer a $1,000 check made out to Gardens 101 Association and began digging. Steve Deputy, president of Natureland Tree Farms, a 300-acre tree farm and nursery in Pasco County, said it's hard to put a set price on reclinata palms because they vary in shape and form and tend to grow as clumps composed of multiple stems reaching 25 feet to 50 feet in height. The slender stems are covered with brown fiber and curve away from the center of the clump in graceful arcs. "The problem is that no two are the same," Deputy said. But he did think the $1,000 the association received was "a pretty fair figure," considering the costs involved in removing and transporting the tree. But residents of Gardens 101 say money was never an issue. The association doesn't need to sell its trees to pay its bills, they say. Dorothy Woods, 77, a retired publicist who has lived at the condominium for 13 years, watched Monday afternoon as the crane pulled the palm from the ground. "We're not in the tree-selling business," she said, shaking her head.
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