Twitter user @SamAsIAm wrote:
A friend who is a municipal arborist just called to tell me about a guy who cut down 32 big mature trees on his neighbor's NJ property to get a better view of NYC. He hired a guy who hired another guy. Cut them down and left the debris there. The fine per tree is $1000 so the guy propably thought he was going to just pay a $32k fine. But the arborist wrote violations to all 3 parties, 96 in all (by hand, took him 12 hours) and there's a provision requiring the replanting of like trees "of the same size." And it's on an inaccessible by road mountainside. He put the affronted landowner in touch with the only guy who would take on such a job. Thry have to build a road, remove the debris, plant big trees and water them for two years. He quoted $1.5 million. And additional fines total $400k. I hope whoever this ass is he can't pay and they lien and sell his property, the value of which he probably figured would be increased so much a $32k fine was worth it, to cover the cost. We are living in the Jaime Dimon ethos. "So fine us, we can afford it."
The PS to this is I was just given a zoom link to the 1st court hearing tomorrow. I'm not sure if it's just for trail participants or spectators can use it, but if they let me observe I'll add more. It doesn't appear to have been picked up by any news source yet.
A bit overwhelmed I had to mute notices and will check early if zoom link is supposed to be public. Preliminary hearing is 1:30 EDT. May be very limited. I don't want to be disruptive but will be back with the answer. And likely it'll hit the news.
And thanks for all the follows!
I hope the tree gutters pay dearly, but I wonder if the access road will be counterproductive in terms of the environment.
