Wealth and hubris fuel the tale of a politically connected Missouri couple who allegedly poisoned their neighbor’s trees to secure their million-dollar view of Camden Harbor. The incident that was unearthed by the victim herself — the philanthropic wife of L.L. Bean’s late president — has united local residents in outrage.
To make matters worse, the herbicide used to poison the trees leached into a neighboring park and the town’s only public seaside beach. The state attorney general is now investigating.
“Anybody dumb enough to poison trees right next to the ocean should be prosecuted, as far as I’m concerned,” said Paul Hodgson, echoing the view of many exasperated residents in Camden, a community of 5,000 nestled at the foot of mountains that sweep upward from the Atlantic Ocean and overlook a harbor filled with lobster boats, yachts and schooners.
Amelia Bond, former CEO of the St. Louis Foundation, which oversees charitable funds with more than $500 million in assets, brought the herbicide from Missouri in 2021 and applied it near oak trees on the waterfront property of Lisa Gorman, wife of the late Leon Gorman, L.L. Bean’s president and grandson of L.L. himself, according to a pair of consent agreements with the town and the state pesticide board.
Bond’s husband, Arthur Bond III, is an architect and the nephew of former U.S. Sen. Kit Bond. Their summer home, owned by a trust, is situated directly behind Gorman’s home, farther up the hill.
What does the penalty look like and how will this return the trees to the community?
$215,200, which includes $30k for environmental testing and monitoring. Tebuthiuron doesn’t readily break down and so will continue to kill plants in the area until it’s either physically removed or diluted somehow, which will likely take multiple years. Unless they excavate and replace the soil, no trees will grow there for quite some time. And even then it’ll take 30-40 years for them to get anywhere close to their original height.
1.7 million at this point actually, and that’s only so far.
Much more importantly to these rich shitheads, the entire local community of 5000 hates their guts. Hard to enjoy your summer home when youre reviled by everyone around you.
They could be fined a small amount for cutting down the trees and then include a provision that the trees must be replaced with trees of the same size. If they were large trees, then that could get super expensive very quickly. There was a story about tree law on Reddit where someone cut down 32 trees on their neighbor’s property and were charged $1k each plus the cost of replanting, it ended up just shy of $2M.
Yeah. You don’t mess with tree law. Since there’s no guarantee that the trees transported will take and it has to be done again.
The poisoned water way is a new twist on the old I’m an idiot who’s going to pay dearly for my hubris motif.