Imperial Beach Palm Caper Leaves City Officials Frowning

Imperial Beach officials have closed the case of the purloined palms, although they thought they had the culprit dead to rights.

The South Bay city struck a deal with the alleged treenaper, accepting 5-foot-tall fan palms from him to replace the stately 30-foot Washingtonia robusta palms that had lined one residential street for as long as the city had been a city.

City Manager Sherm Stenberg admits he is still seething over the possibility that the 18 missing Imperial Beach palms, dug up two weeks ago, are now gracing some new luxury development in Palm Springs. But, on the bright side, the young replacement palms are expected to be a lot healthier and less destructive to sidewalks and sewer pipes than the tall, slender Washingtonias, he said.

“The (tree removal) company is still in town,” Stenberg said, “but they are not eyeballing any more of our trees.” Even so, Stenberg has issued orders to his municipal troops to keep an eye out for the villain suspected of ripping off, or more correctly, ripping out valuable palms from city property--the parkway between the sidewalk and the street.

The alleged heavy in this caper is C. Douglas Coomes, who operates The Palm Company of Encinitas out of his automobile via mobile telephone. He could not be reached to rebut the city manager’s contentions that Coomes parlayed city permission to remove three palm trees into assumed authority to rip out a row of 30-foot-tall palms all the way down the block, with or without the residents’ permission. But he has given his version to city officials.

Calls From Residents

Stenberg said that the first he heard of the massive tree rip-off came in irate calls from residents in the area who arrived home to find gaping holes in their front yards where palm trees once stood. The trees and the rented rig that had lifted them from the earth were nearby. The “evidence” was “stacked like cordwood” awaiting transport, Stenberg said.

The city manager admits that he gave an Imperial Beach property owner permission to remove three city-owned palm trees from his residential property about two weeks ago because the trees’ roots were cracking the sidewalk. The owner contracted with Coomes to do the work. Coomes’ crew, in a burst of energy, plucked the palms from the remainder of the block.

Here the manager’s story and Coomes’ story part company. Stenberg said he told the property owner to have Coomes contact him, which the tree man did, and he discussed with Coomes a future curb and sidewalk improvement program soon to begin in the beach city that might include removal of some of the most destructive palms. Coomes contended, when confronted by city inspectors and sheriff’s deputies, that he had simply begun the work that the city was planning to do earlier than it was scheduled.

Whatever the exact circumstances, C. Douglas Coomes could have been charged with 15 felonies--grand theft, tree--for his afternoon’s palm-snatching, according to Sheriff’s Detective Douglas Newkirk, because he made off with 15 pieces of city property, each worth more than $400 fair market value, without a city permit. But, Newkirk said, the city has refused to prosecute and has reached a compromise with Coomes. The alleged crime now is “reduced to a civil matter,” and Newkirk has more important things to pursue.

Worth Up to $90 a Foot

The value of Washingtonia palms in good health ranges from a wholesale low of $15 a foot up to a retail high of $90 a foot, the Sheriff’s Department investigator said. By that estimate, Coomes could have grossed more than $50,000 for the Imperial Beach trees.

Rumors that the Washingtonias are now basking in some posh desert spa came from evidence of business connections between Coomes and an Indio nursery and landscaping firm, William D. Young & Sons.

A spokeswoman for W.D. Young refused to talk to a reporter. “I won’t say a thing. You will just put a lot of horrible stuff in the paper,” she said when asked to verify Coomes’ dealings with the company, which does business in both the San Diego and Palm Springs area.

Fred Hawkins, Palm Springs’ community services director, said city records do not show any dealings with Coomes or evidence the Imperial Beach Washingtonia robusta palms now wave their fronds on city property along Palm Canyon Drive. But, he said, developers are going great guns in the desert community and are required, by city code, to install mature landscaping plants in their projects.

Hawkins, who worked for a tree removal firm when he was in college, said he knows that some companies earmark likely specimens for reaping and compile an inventory of other people’s trees that they can tap when an order comes in. Sometimes the trees are taken without the property owners’ knowledge or under the pretense that the removal company is under contract with the city to remove the trees, he said.

Evergreen Nursery, a San Diego wholesale nursery that contracts with tree removal companies to supply it with stock, officials said they had not heard of Coomes or The Palm Company. Nor had one of their tree stock suppliers, the North County Tree Co.

Pamela Oakley, a partner with Mark Lorenzen in the North County tree removal firm, said that the Imperial Beach palm tree caper had cost the company plenty of business.

“I’m really bummed out about this guy and what he’s doing to our image,” Oakley said. “We know the rules and when we are negotiating for a tree on city property--within 6 to 10 feet from the curb--we require the property owner to obtain a city permit. Our experience is that nobody has ever been refused a permit to remove a tree.”

“We don’t think it’s fair that he should come in and ruin a good and necessary business,” Oakley said of Coomes. “We play the game right and then this sort of thing happens. We are lucky if we don’t go under because of this mess.”