Workers for America’s largest outdoor advertising company have confessed to illegally poisoning trees that obscure billboards in Florida, reigniting a long simmering scandal in the industry.
“We always cut trees illegal,” Robert Barnhart, a former employee at Lamar Advertising Co. in Tallahassee, toldinvestigators from the Florida Department of Agriculture:
After a while I started actually riding around with my boss and he would show me trees he wanted poisoned. And, uh you know, he would tell me how to do it, you know, call it hit and run, machete at the roots and you pour poison, pesticides—we don’t know what is is, uh, you would put it in a plastic container and it would eat its way through the plastic container. I mean, it’s pretty gnarly stuff.”
Barnhardt is suing Lamar Advertising under the Florida Private Whistleblower’s Act, contending he was fired after he refused to continue poisoning trees.