Residents of an Annapolis town house community are going up against the president of their homeowners association, whom they say is cutting down healthy trees and risking erosion while also collecting free trees from a city program.
“The city might want to reconsider giving him trees when he’s a known tree killer and maybe he’ll just cut them down in a year,” said Sharon Weidenfeld, a resident of the Gentry Court community, which is buffered by a forest of about 400 trees slowly being thinned out.
“It’s like the SPCA giving a puppy to a known puppy killer. Adopting 10 new puppies doesn’t make you a good person if you’re killing the five dogs you already have.”
Weidenfeld and other residents have said they’re disturbed by the sawed-off stumps on the property where flourishing trees once stood.
“I’m all for planting new trees, but there’s no point in cutting down healthy, young trees that aren’t a hazard to the community,” she said.
Brad Merry, 65, who is president of the homeowners association and a resident of the community for 25 years, said he’s acting in the community’s best interest.
Merry said he consults Bartlett Tree Service in Annapolis and follows a landscaping plan intended to restore the forest to its native vegetation.
“This is for the good of the community,” he said.
“This is not a casual, careless effort. It’s a very organized plan approved by three [homeowners association] boards.”
Merry receives about 17 free trees from the city each year. He asks the residents to sign permission slips authorizing the city to give their trees to him.
The program is intended to make Annapolis communities greener, but Merry said he can’t plant new trees without thinning out the woods so sunlight can reach the forest floor.
He recently removed a thick brush of Japanese honeysuckle that he said was “choking out” new trees.
Weidenfeld said the honeysuckle was vital to the bees pollinating plants and that Merry’s clearing of trees in February displaced the squirrels.
However, Merry’s actions aren’t illegal or subject to city regulation, according to the city’s Department of Neighborhood and Environmental Programs.
Merry said the city has “no authority in the matter,” and his landscape plan was approved by city environmentalist Jan van Zutphen.
But van Zutphen wrote in a recent e-mail to Weidenfeld that he’d “neither seen nor approved a landscaping plan.”
Van Zutphen said he’d received “a number of complaints” and expressed his own concerns to Merry over “sediment and erosion issues related to the cleaning of vegetation.”
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