Florida Seeks OK to Enforce Canker Law

MIAMI -- In the first use in Miami-Dade County of new provisions in the citrus canker eradication law, the state will ask a judge this week for 500 search warrants to locate and remove citrus trees in the northern tier of the county.

The 500 properties are owned by people the department has been unable to contact after repeated efforts, said Mark Fagan, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

The properties stretch across the county, from the Atlantic to the Everglades, all within six miles of the Broward County line, bordered on the south by a line passing through North Miami and extending west.

The targeted properties are within 1,900 feet of sites where crews have found and removed canker-infected trees as well as exposed trees with owners' permission.

No plans have been announced for a similar effort in Broward County.

The state has chain-sawed more than 650,000 residential trees in its war on canker, most of them in South Florida.

Canker blemishes fruit and eventually weakens the tree, reducing its yield, citrus officials say. The disease threatens not only residential citrus trees, but also the state's commercial citrus industry, which the department says is worth $9 billion a year to the state economy.

Under the state's eradication program, a citrus tree within 1,900 feet of an infected tree is presumed exposed and likely to become infected, thus jeopardizing other trees. The only way to stop the spread, state officials say, is to cut down all citrus trees within 1,900 feet of an infected one.

The controversial policy resulted in a major lawsuit by South Florida homeowners and governments, who challenged the science behind the 1,900-foot rule, but the Florida Supreme Court this year upheld the state's program.

The warrants, along with the use of public relations teams, are part of a stepped-up effort to remove about 170,000 exposed and infected trees throughout South Florida by the end of 2005, Fagan said. Survey crews are finding infected trees every day throughout South Florida.

The new law allows state workers to serve agricultural search warrants without the presence of a police officer. The new law also gives the department 60 days instead of the previous 10-day limit to complete the process.

Critics who opposed passage said those changes and others give the state too much power.

The state still has to convince a judge of the necessity for a warrant. ''Prior to any agricultural warrant, we send in our public relations team to get people to voluntarily sign waivers,'' Fagan said. ``We have been getting excellent results. Refusals are minimal.''

Of late, crews have been refused permission to cut diseased or exposed trees by only 6.7 percent of the people asked, Fagan said.

Homeowners have 10 days to appeal the department's decision to cut a tree.