Conn. Gov. Ned Lamont had thousands of trees, bushes illegally cut behind $7.5M home infuriating neighbors: A chainsaw massacre

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.

“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.“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’...