Charmed Scofflaws Face Day Of Reckoning

Hamden officials are set to decide this week whether a politically connected landscaper gets a second chance in town after repeatedly violating zoning laws and evading taxes — or whether time’s up and it must cough up $270,000 (and counting) in fines.

Piles of logs and dirt at the business, Paradise Landscaping and Tree Removal, have grown and diminished for a year, the backhoes cutting fresh tracks across the ground, and wood splitters have coughed up firewood — all in defiance of the town’s zoning laws and a cease and desist order.

Tuesday, just over one year after the landscaper was ordered to halt all activities at its property, the Planning and Zoning Commission will decide how the landscaper can, and cannot, proceed.

Last September, the Planning and Zoning Department issued a cease and desist order against Paradise. Zoning officials had discovered that the landscaper was operating without a zoning permit or a certificate of zoning compliance at its property at 82 – 92 Crestway in Hamden. Without those approvals, it was not supposed to be doing anything.

It had also constructed a building, which it appears to be using though it still does not have a certificate of occupancy, and therefore does not pay full taxes on it.

As time went on, it became clear that the mess ran deeper than a few missing permits — about 90 feet deeper. When zoning officials visited the site in October, they discovered that Paradise had dumped about 6,000 cubic yards of wood, dirt, rocks, and other debris about 90 feet onto its neighbors’ properties.

Meanwhile, the fines were racking up. Shortly after the cease and desist order, Hamden Zoning Enforcement Officer Holly Masi issued a citation that carried with it fines of $150 per violation per day. With five violations, more than 365 days later, Paradise could be on the hook for over $270,000.

But the threat of those fines has not stopped Paradise from continuing its work. When the Independent visited the site last November, a wood splitter was pointing up into a dumpster of freshly split wood. Neighbors said crews were out about six days a week splitting wood and doing other work.

In March, the town applied for an injunction against the landscaper, which would have brought the enforcement into the hands of the courts. A court date was scheduled for April, but was canceled because of the pandemic and has not been rescheduled.

After the town issued a cease and desist order, Paradise was not supposed to do any work whatsoever on the property. Zoning officials planned to examine the property and then come up with a plan for remediation before any work took place. The zoning department ordered Paradise to remove everything it had on the property, including the many vehicles it was storing there illegally, and cease all work of any kind. Since the landscaper also did not have a certificate of occupancy for the building it had constructed, the building should not be in use either.

Despite the threat of a court date, Paradise kept working.

When the Independent visited in August, there were still piles of logs and branches lying around the property. A whole bank of plows that had not been there before was sitting in an adjacent lot owned by Paradise, for which it does not yet have the permit for vehicle storage.

The door to the warehouse building was open, and a light was on inside. Someone in a Jeep was driving around the property.

In September, the logs and trucks were still there. Workers were operating two backhoes, one on a slope on the southern side of the property, one creating a pile of dirt that had not been there before. A dump truck whirred into motion, backed up, and dumped its contents near where the backhoe was lifting dirt onto a pile. The door to the building was open. At one point, a man in a gray T‑shirt stepped out onto the balcony and looked around before heading back in.

Paradise has now submitted a plan for remediation of the property, the first step towards compliance with zoning laws that would allow it to come back to the commission to get another site plan approved.

Ruslan Boyarsky, who operates Paradise, has repeatedly told the Independent that he is not operating from the site.

“I’m trying to live life. I’m trying to get through as a business owner, as a small business owner in town,” he said in a September phone call with the Independent.

He referred all further questions to his lawyer Joseph Porto. Porto did not return a call requesting comment.

Tax Breaks & No-Bid Contracts

Paradise Landscaping has a history of zoning breaches at a separate location in New Haven, where it operates out of 86 Fitch St. In 2015 and 2016, it ran afoul of zoning laws when it illegally stored a large pile of mulch at its Fitch Street lot.

As it turns out, Paradise has a brief history in Hamden, too, though one up until this year characterized not by zoning enforcement actions but by no-bid contracts and tax abatement agreements.

In 2016, Paradise bought the Crestway property using the title 8292 Crest Way, LLC. Boyarsky said the company bought the site because it was hoping to move its permanent headquarters there from New Haven.

In 2017, Boyarsky went before the Planning and Zoning Commission to get approval for the site. The commission approved his site plan.

But he was then supposed to go get a zoning permit before he began any work on the property to follow the site plan.

He skipped that step, which would later land him in trouble.

In March of 2018, the Hamden Legislative Council passed a tax abatement agreement with Paradise. Paradise promised to invest $300,000 into the property, and bring a new business to town. In exchange, Paradise was supposed to get a tax abatement of 25 percent for three years after completing the work. It was also supposed to get 50 percent off on its building permit fees.

Economic Development Coordinator Dale Kroop said the town grants a few such tax abatement agreements to businesses every year. Since Paradise has run afoul of the town’s zoning laws, he said, Paradise will not be able to reap the tax rewards of the agreement anymore.

But Paradise does get a sort of tax abatement of its own making. Since it still does not have a certificate of occupancy for the building, the building has not been appraised, and Paradise does not pay full taxes on it.

Assistant Assessor Maurice Johnson said that information in the town assessor’s database shows that Paradise is being taxed for just a partial construction — perhaps just a foundation. The building, though, appears to be complete. In the last year as the Independent has visited the site, the building has not changed, and there have been no signs that any construction has taken place on the building itself.

Though Paradise will not get the tax abatement in its agreement, it did manage to get the 50 percent off of its building permit fee. According to the building department, it paid $2,018.50 for its building permit and related costs. Without the 50 percent taken off, it would have paid $4,107.50 (some pieces of that fee are not subject to the 50 percent discount).

Paradise was not supposed to get the building permit in the first place, though. According to state law, building permits cannot be issued without a zoning permit. Somehow, the building department ended up issuing the building permit even though Paradise had never gotten its zoning permit.

Building Official Bob Labulis told the Independent that he issued the permit because he knew the Planning and Zoning Commission had approved the application.Commission approval alone is not enough, though.

When asked to clarify, Labulis replied: ​“I’m not getting into this show with the papers. You can go to the meeting and write about what happens there.” He then hung up the phone.

No-Bid Contracts

The building department issued the building permit on Aug. 1, 2018. At the time, Paradise was already thoroughly engaged with the town.

Two and a half months earlier, a tornado had ripped through the northern part of town, flattening sections of forest and causing large swaths of downed trees.

After the tornado, Mayor Curt Leng declared a public emergency. The town immediately hired a few contractors on no-bid contracts to help with the cleanup. Because of the emergency, those contracts did not need to go through the competitive bidding process or be approved by the Legislative Council. One of the companies the town hired was Paradise.

Paradise started its no-bid work for the town on June 5, and continued working until the end of the month.

In September, months after the tornado, the town again skirted the competitive bidding process and issued five emergency no-bid contracts for continued storm cleanup. The new bid waivers were a continuation of the original emergency bid waivers, as all five contractors had already been doing cleanup for the town. Those contractors were JTF Holdings LLC, Nature’s Harvest, K&J Tree Service, Cherry Hill Construction, and, of course, Paradise.

Paradise’s second wave of work began in September, and it continued through November. In total, Hamden paid Paradise $254,125. The town was then reimbursed for the tornado cleanup with a $2 million FEMA grant.

In the fall, when zoning officials met with Boyarsky and his lawyer Joseph Porto, Boyraksy told them that the wood on his property was left over from the tornado debris. Zoning officials said he told them that other companies were also bringing wood up to the site and dumping it there.

In a March phone call with the Independent, Boyarksy again said the wood that had been on the property was from the tornado. He said he was using the site as a staging location for storm debris. Some of the wood, he said, came from private projects, and some of it came from the contract with the town. Other contractors brought debris there as well, he said, but did not say who.

If what Boyarksy said is true and he did in fact bring wood from the town contract to his property, that would have violated the terms of Hamden’s FEMA grant. The grant required that all wood be brought to five designated staging locations to then be ground into woodchips and disposed of. The Paradise lot, of course, was not one of those five approved sites.

Assistant Public Works Director Mike Siciliano said that all the wood Boyarksy brought to his property must have come from his work for private clients. There would have been no need for the town to bring material there, he said, because the town had enough space between its five staging locations. No other public works employees who spoke with the Independent said they had any knowledge of wood being brought to the Paradise property.

Some town officials have also said they are concerned about a potential conflict of interest with Paradise and the public works department.

Boyarsky is the son-in-law of Siciliano. While Siciliano said he is not responsible for any of the contract hiring the department does, it was his responsibility to sign off on bid waivers. His signature appears alongside those of Director Craig Cesare and that of the purchasing agent. Invoices of many of the contractors, including those from Paradise, were also addressed directly to him.

According to town ordinance, employees must disclose any potential conflicts of interest through a letter filed with the town clerk. Siciliano filed a letter in December of 2018, after the tornado cleanup had been completed. He said he filed it then because he had not been aware that he had to, and the town attorney told him he must.

“I have nothing to do with zoning, and I have not gotten involved with that,” Siciliano said when asked about his relationship with Boyarsky. “Whatever he’s doing has nothing to do with me. He married my stepdaughter. That’s as far as it goes. I would never risk my job for him or anyone else in their own private business.”

Boyarksy and Porto will present a plan for remediating the site on Tuesday, including a plan for removing the 6,000 cubic yards of material dumped onto the neighboring properties. If the commission approves the plan, Boyarsky will then seek an amendment to his original site plan. If the commission denies the remediation application… “We cross that bridge when we come to it,” said Town Planner Dan Kops.

The meeting will take place on Zoom at 7 p.m. Tuesday. Click here to view the agenda and the Zoom link.