Hypocrisy’s the root of the problem.
Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont had thousands of trees and bushes illegally chopped behind his sprawling Greenwich home — despite publicly championing a statewide effort to plant more conifers, according to angry neighbors and other sources.
The wealthy 70-year-old Democrat was hit with a citation for cutting down more than 180 trees in a protected wetland area to allegedly get a better view of a pond from his $7.6 million abode, CT Insider reported Tuesday.
“[It’s a] chainsaw massacre,” land use attorney John Tesei, who represents nearby property owners INCT LLC, said according to the outlet.
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“I’ve never seen anything, overall, like this, ever.”
“Our clients are deeply disturbed and devastated,” he said at a March 25 wetlands meeting.
Lamont allegedly hired workers to axe the beloved sugar maples, beech trees and pignut hickories without permits on several acres behind his seven-bedroom manse in early November, sources from the city’s Inland Wetlands and Watercourse Agency told the paper.
Some of the trees were 40 feet tall — and a vital part of the delicate ecosystem on the wooded banks of a small river, the sources said.
Fred Jacobsen, a property manager for privately-owned forest lands in Greenwich’s Midcountry, heard a chainsaw buzzing near the governor’s home on Nov. 9 and called police, he said.
“It was a coordinated destruction of the entire ecosystem in that area,” Jacobsen said at the meeting.
The saw-wielding workers also crossed a property line, “trespassing” onto land owned by INCT LLC, a Delaware-based company, staffers with the wetland agency said in documents.
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“The Lamonts appear to be the ones that hired the contractor,” Beth Evans, the town’s director of environmental affairs who advises the wetland agency, told CT Insider.
Lamont, his neighbors the Viks and the Ashton Drive Association were all hit with citations for wetland violations in Greenwich, according to the paper.
“It’s no coincidence that the cutting opened up a very wide view of the lake for the personal aesthetic benefit and viewing enjoyment of two dwellings, Gov. Lamont and the Viks,” said Peter Thorén, an executive of INCT LLC said at the meeting.
He called the hacked trees an “illegal invasion.”
Lamont’s $7.6 million house in Greenwich, Conn. ((Google Maps)(Getty Images))
Greenwich’s wetland association ultimately issued a cease-and-correct order on Nov. 28, which was sent to the Lamonts, the Viks and the Ashton Drive Association. It wasn’t immediately clear if the politician would be charged a fine.
No criminal charges were filed over the alleged trespassing, the Greenwich Police told the paper.
But the conifer-slashing flies in the face of an environmentally friendly plan the governor announced last April to plant thousands of trees in dense urban parts of the state.
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At the time, Lamont sought a slice of the $1 billion in federal funding for urban forestry programs allocated by the Inflation Reduction Act, commissioner for the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, Katie Dykes, said in April 2023.
Locals now want the greenery-chopping governor to replace the dead trees and shrubs.
“The perpetrators should restore the entire area as closely as possible to the way it was,” Jacobsen said.
(Brad Horrigan/Hartford Courant/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Lamont, a former cable television entrepreneur and Harvard University grad, raked in more than $54 million in annual income in 2021, according to the CT Mirror.
His 2.5-acre abode at 4 Ashton Drive is valued at $7.57 million, according to redfin.com.
“This is a dispute between the homeowners association and one of the neighbors,” a rep for Lamont told The Post Wednesday. She claims the HOA was given the citation, not the governor.
“The association and the neighbors are working it out,” Lamont told CT Insider.
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A rep from the Inland Wetlands and Watercourse Agency declined to comment, saying the matter would be discussed at a public hearing Monday afternoon.
The conifer clash echos a similar battle that broke out in June over 32 chopped trees in New Jersey. In that case, the culprit was fined $13,000.
