“Paradise” Remediation Stalled, As Politically Connected Scofflaw Hits A Wall

The Hamden Planning and Zoning Commission spent nearly three hours heaping a pile of ire almost as deep as the rocks and dirt at 82 – 92 Crestway on Rus Boyarsky and his illegal landscaping operation.

Then it stalled his only path forward with the town for another month.

And if what his lawyer says is true, that will put him in a tight spot come Sept. 30 when he has to leave his other property.

Boyarsky also now has to provide the funds for Hamden to hire a consultant to determine whether any of the debris dumped on his property is infested with insects.

Those were the outcomes of a Tuesday night commission meeting concerning Boyarsky and a business he runs in town, Paradise Landscaping and Tree Removal, that has continually violated zoning orders.

Boyarsky’s attorney, Joseph Porto, appeared before the commission Tuesday evening to represent Boyarsky’s equest approval for a plan to remediate his property in Hamden.

Boyarsky, working under the title 8292 Crestway, LLC, has been working a parcel of land at the end of the industrial cul de sac for about a year in defiance of a cease and desist order from the town.

After months of negotiations with the town, and many more months of waiting due to the pandemic, Boyarsky Tuesday finally presented the plan his engineer had drawn up for remediating the damage he has already done to the property.

Last year, zoning officials discovered that Boyarsky was operating a landscaping business without a zoning permit. He had gotten site plan approval from the commission in 2017, but never got the permit. Zoning Enforcement Officer Holly Masi issued a notice of violation, and then a cease and desist order, and then a citation carrying hefty fines.

After the cease and desist order, Boyarsky was not supposed to conduct any activity on the property whatsoever, even if it was intended to bring the property into compliance with the site plan. But he continued to work.

Zoning officials then discovered that Boyarsky had dumped about 6,000 cubic yards of dirt, rock, and tree debris up to 90 feet onto two neighboring properties.

Read more about Paradise’s history and mess with the town here.

Boyarsky had come to the commission Tuesday evening to get his plan approved to remediate that dumping. The plan laid out the exact steps Boyarsky and his crews would take to haul the dumped material off the slope where it now sits and return the land to its original grade. He also submitted an application for an amendment to his site plan, which would eventually allow him to continue with his plans to headquarter his landscaping operation there. That application will not come to the commission until after it has dealt with the remediation application.

But after hours of heavy skepticism and a few sharp cracks from commissioners, Boyarsky will have to wait at least another month before he has the town’s go ahead to start the remediation.

It appears that Boyarsky will need the property much sooner. Porto told the commission Tuesday evening that he is selling his previous headquarters at 86 Fitch St. in New Haven, where he got into a separate zoning mess in 2015 and 2016.

The sale goes into effect Sept. 30, Porto said. He said Boyarsky had hoped to have the Hamden permitting process solved by the time of the sale. The sale date, though, has fallen a far cry short of the end of his troubles with the town, if there is ever to be an end.

“It leaves him in the difficult position of having literally no other place to work,” Porto told the commission.

Come Sept. 30, Boyarsky will have nowhere to operate legally if indeed he is selling his Fitch Street lot.

Lack of legal approval, though, has not stopped him in the past.

Boyarsky has been doing work on his Crestway property for a year in defiance of the cease and desist order. Zoning officials had no confidence that he would stop even though his remediation application has stalled.

Commission Vice Chair Joseph McDonagh, who presided over Tuesday’s meeting, gave what may have been the most scathing assessment of Boyarsky and his exploits.

“This guy is like a poor man’s Joe Farricielli,” he said, referring to the former state representative from Branford who gave Hamden and state officials years of headache over a site where he illegally dumped millions of tires. As McDonagh told the story, Farricelli refused to comply with laws, exposing the weaknesses in local zoning officials’ ability to enforce regulations. The dumping site, known as the ​“tire pond,” has still not been cleaned up.

“This fellow probably has the ambition to be Joe Farricielli, but he’s not making it yet,” McDonagh said.

Dirt, Logs, And Bugs

Wednesday afternoon, a few trucks, trailers, and other pieces of heavy machinery were still at Paradise’s 86 Fitch S. property in New Haven. A worker was moving a few pieces of metal with a telehandler. No one answered the office door, but a pickup truck pulled out of the driveway and drove off at one point. There were no piles of dirt or mulch or brush visible from the road.

The site looked very different from Paradise’s Hamden property, which is home to large piles of logs and dirt, and a large array of construction and landscaping equipment and parked plows.

Paradise is no stranger to cease and desist orders. New Haven issued one against the landscaper when it was operating illegally out of Fitch Street. City spokesperson Gage Frank said Paradise made four applications before the City Plan Commission — for a special permit, a site plan, a coastal site plan, and inland wetlands review. All four were denied, and Paradise appealed those decisions, but the appeals are still pending. In order to resolve those pending appeals and the cease and desist order, Frank wrote to the Independent, Paradise agreed to follow zoning laws ​“as it transitioned its business to Hamden.”

Tuesday’s application dealt mostly with the 6,000 cubic yards of rock, dirt, and tree debris that Paradise dumped up to 90 feet onto two neighboring properties. One belongs to an office building on Sherman Avenue below, and the other to a CubeSmart facility. Porto told the commission that the owners of both properties had given their consent to have Paradise enter the property to do the remediation.

The cleanup would happen in four phases, Engineer James DiMeo told the commission. First, excavators would remove a few piles and get the site ready for hauling out material. Then, excavators would remove 1,500 cubic yards and create a platform to reach material lower down on the slope where the dumping occurred. Then, excavators would remove the bulk of the material, and would finally return the land to its original grade.

The material removed from the dumping site would be sorted into piles of dirt, rocks, and wood debris, and taken by Nick Pandolfo of Elite Excavation.

DiMeo said the rock and dirt came from the property itself from the excavation of detention basins.

Porto answered about the trees, a much trickier question. He said they likely came from a number of places, including from cleanup from the 2018 tornado that flattened large swaths of forest in the town. Any trees brought to the property during the tornado, he said, were from Paradise’s work on private properties, and not from its contract with the town.

Hamden gave Paradise a no-bid contract in 2018 to help clear town roads and haul tree debris. All debris was supposed to be brought to five DEEP-approved sites. If Paradise brought debris from its contract with the town to its own lot, that would have violated the terms of the FEMA grant the town got for the cleanup.

In an interview with the Independent after the meeting, Porto reiterated that no tree debris came from the town contract. ​“That I think is inaccurate,” he said of the idea that some debris might have come from Paradise’s work for the town. ​“That is not at all the case, and I think that’s an unfair thing to say. Because that’s not what I believe to have happened.”

In a March interview with the Independent, Boyarsky gave a different account. He said that some of the trees on the property came from the contract with the town, and some came from private projects.

Press releases from 2018 show that contractors were supposed to bring debris from their private contracts to the transfer station, which was one of the five approved debris management sites.

Bugs?

At Tuesday’s meeting, Lauren Garrett, a former Legislative Council member and mayoral candidate, acted as an intervenor in the application. As an intervenor, she was given the same status as the applicant, and was able to make a presentation.

She listed a long list of concerns about the Paradise application, the company’s puzzling dealings with the town, and the potential environmental impact of the landscaper’s property.

Among other assertions, she said the debris brought to the site may well have been contaminated with insects or other contaminants. Town press releases from right after the storm urge residents not to take any woodchips that have been chipped from storm debris because of the risk of contamination.

While the commission stalled the application until Oct. 27, it did take action on the contamination question.

Boyarsky’s application did not provide any information on whether or not the debris could contain harmful insects.

Porto objected to Garrett’s suggestion of contamination, calling it, and the rest of Garrett’s presentation, ​“pure speculation.”

“Yes, but speculation has its value,” said McDonagh. If there are harmful insects, that is something the commission would want to know.

Other commissioners agreed. They voted to require that Boyarsky provide the town funds to hire a consultant to assess the debris for contamination. Porto tried, and failed, to convince the commission that it should leave the hiring to Boyarsky.

When asked whether his client would comply with the commission’s order and provide funds for the town to hire a consultant before the next meeting, Porto replied: ​“I think that’s definitely going to be complied with.”

“Everything Is Illegal”

Paradise will have to come before the commission again to get its remediation plan approved. Even if it gets approval to remove the debris it dumped on its neighbors’ properties, it will still have to come back to the commission again to get approval for an amended site plan before it can operate legally on the property.

If Tuesday’s meeting is any indication, commissioners appear to have little appetite to trust Paradise.

At one point or another, nearly every commissioner who spoke voiced some form of disgust with the applicant.

“It’s an absolute disgrace,” said Michele Mastropetre of her recent visit to the site. ​“The site is a total disaster. I find it hard to believe that somebody would accidentally encroach onto another property by 90 feet and not realize what they were doing.”

As Dan Kops told the commission later in the meeting, there used to be a stone wall where the property line was that Paradise removed, meaning it was once very clear where the property line was.

“The owner just totally disregarded our prior approvals. So, I don’t really see why we should believe anything that we’re being told tonight that that’s actually going to happen,” said Commissioner Paul Begemann. 

Porto said a part of the problem was the fact that the pandemic stalled the commission. He said his client had filed the application for remediation in March, and it didn’t come before the commission until six months later.

But, as McDonagh pointed out, zoning officials discovered the violations in August of 2019. ​“So that’s a year. It’s rather late to blame the pandemic,” he said.

Despite the cease and desist order, Paradise has continued to operate on the property for a year. ​“This application might be simply a device to continue operating on the property while the remediation is going on,” McDonagh said.

Throughout the meeting, and in an interview with the Independent, Porto objected to the assertion that Boyarsky has been ​“operating” on the property.

At one point during the meeting, Porto questioned one commissioner’s use of the term ​“illegal” when referring to the dumping of 6,000 cubic yards of debris onto neighboring properties.

“Well, Mr. Porto, pretty much everything your client has done on the site is illegal,” McDonagh fired back.

When speaking with the Independent, Porto again objected to the characterization that Boyarsky has been operating on the property. ​“I don’t agree with your position that for the last year he has continued to operate at 82 Crestway,” he told the Independent.

The Independent has visited the site four times since October 2019 — in October, November, August, and September. People were on the property at all of those visits. The Independent observed heavy machinery operating in the October and September visits. In November, a wood splitter was on the property next to a dumpster of what looked like fresh firewood. At every visit, the property looked very different. And since the cease and desist order is still in effect, any activity, including storage of trucks (of which there are many) and remediation work, are illegal.

Bob Percopo, a neighbor who spoke at Tuesday’s meeting, said he hears heavy machinery on the property every day, and has all summer.

When asked whether his client would continue to work on the property before the next meeting, continuing to violate the cease and desist order, Porto replied: ​“It is a simple question but not such a simple answer.”

“As I have indicated to you on the instances that we have discussed,” he told the Independent, ​“the plan has been to work with the town to accomplish the task of getting the property properly permitted, and that is the process that we are presently undergoing.”

Kops told the commission that by his rough estimate, Boyarsky owes about $264,000 in fines. He said the town will continue to try and collect them. It may take the teeth of the courts to do so, though. The town has filed an injunction, but the hearing was postponed because of the pandemic.

Porto said he would defend his client in court against them. ​“We are very concerned with the fines,” he said. ​“But we shall do our best to defend the allegation and claims.”