Brentwood neighbors near the in intersection of York and Middlesex drives were shocked last Thursday and Friday when large trees on a half-acre lot were clear-cut by workers who arrived in an unmarked truck.
Paul Rhode, who lives down the street from the lot, said it was “cloak and dagger stuff ever since they started this, from not identifying who they really are or what the scope of the work was.”
Rhode said the workers told him the work was for the Metropolitan Sewer District, but he said didn’t believe that. A sign on the lot from the association trustees orders the property owner, which is identified, to finish the job.
Rhode also said there’s no purpose for the clearing, since a house can’t be built there per association bylaws which limits the number of houses to 143 — that’s the number there now.
Fox 2 News confirmed that Boris Bukhstaber owns the property and had the trees removed but he had no other comment. Bukhstaber did not return a call to 40 South News on Tuesday.
Linda Rohde said a creek runs through the lot, and run-off with be unchecked when it rains. She said the house at the bottom of the hill already had flooding problems.
Anne Keely, who lives next to the lot, said she cried when it happened. “Our son used to call it ‘the forest,’ and they used to play in ‘the forest,’ but now they can’t.”
Disagree with Dan’s tunnel-vision assessment, which for me is a mean-spirited view of a neighbor’s responsibility to a neighborhood.
The case makes me wonder if the owner had petitioned the homeowners’ association trustees for a variance to build on the lot at some point and was denied. There’s something vindictive at work here. Had the neighbors been given the opportunity to purchase the wooded lot as neighborhood green space? If not, if this truly came out of nowhere — a bizarre, unhinged, angry act. More reporting to be done on this story, Doug.
I like trees as much as the next person, but if I decided to cut down a tree that I owned, I certainly wouldn’t want a story in the paper about it. The fact is that the neighbors used someone else’s property as their personal park and took it for granted that it would always be there for them. Maybe the trees were cut and sold because the owner was in a bad financial situation, but the reason really doesn’t matter. If it was such an important place for the neighborhood, then they should have pooled their money and purchased the property in order to ensure it would remain their personal forest.
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