Court orders golf course owner to stop selling its trees

BARSTOW — The Barstow court issued a cease-and-desist order to prevent the company the owns the old Barstow Country Club from selling trees from the property, at the request of the Barstow Redevelopment Agency.

At issue was the fact that the property owner, Barstow Community Developers LLC was removing and selling trees from the property to a nursery, possibly in violation of its agreement with the city, said city spokesman John Rader.

The company acquired the title to the property, which has not been an active golf course since early 2006,  in April 2006, according to the Barstow office of the San Bernardino County Office of the Assessor. When Barstow Community Developers bought the property from previous owner Michael Popovich, it also took over a 10-year agreement with the city that specified it should be maintained as a golf course, Rader said.

The city believes that the agreement includes keeping the trees intact, he said.

Initially, Barstow Community Developers had been planning to buy properties adjacent to the golf course to expand the course and build homes around it, but in the past six months, those deals fell through, Rader said. Within the past couple of weeks, the city learned from neighbors that full-grown trees were being removed and sold to a nursery. He estimated that the trees were being sold for between $3,000 and $30,000 each.

“The city’s interest is to stop them from removing further trees to maintain the value of the golf course, before all the trees are gone,” Rader said. “... We think basically they’re just taking the value that’s left on the golf course and selling it off.”

Robert Marshall, a partner with Barstow Community Developers, said the tree removal was a “maintenance and irrigation” issue.
“Some of the trees were sold to a nursery, not all of the trees,” he said. “All of the trees are being maintained.”

Marshall declined to comment further. Representatives of Baron Brothers Nursery, which was also named in the restraining order, did not return a call for comment.

Commissioner Kirtland Mahlum ordered Wednesday that no more trees be removed, pending a hearing set for August 13.

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