‘Act of vengeance’: They fought for years to protect tree. Road commissioner removed it after election loss

Since 2014, residents in the unincorporated LeVilla Vaupell subdivision have fought to protect a tree on the line between their neighborhood and the village of Holiday Hills.

On Friday, they woke up to find a private crew, apparently hired by outgoing Nunda Township Highway Commissioner “Iron” Mike Lesperance, taking down the tree.

Removing the tree is Lesperance’s “final act of vengeance,” Rob Parrish said Friday. Parrish, a Nunda Township trustee, beat Lesperance in the April 1 election for highway commissioner, a position Lesperance has held since 2013. He’s due to leave office May 19 when Parrish is sworn in.

Friday was the second time in the past two weeks and the third time overall that a crew arrived to remove the tree at West Northeast Shore Drive and Hyde Park Avenue, just a few yards from the banks of Griswold Lake. Crews left early last week after neighbors surrounded the tree to prevent it from being cut down.

Some of those same neighbors had encircled the tree in 2014 earlier, when Lesperance first sent a crew to take it down. He previously was involved in the removal of a fence that split Hyde Park Avenue, separating Holiday Hills from LeVilla Vaupell, after authorities cited safety concerns. In 2015, neighbors accused Lesperance of removing without notice two pillars at the entrance to their subdivision that had stood since 1931.

When reached by phone Friday morning by the Northwest Herald and asked about the tree removal and its timing, which followed his election loss, Lesperance said, “I have no comment” and hung up.

Nannette Mroz, a longtime resident of the neighborhood, said she was “just dumbfounded” to wake up Friday morning to see workers taking down the tree, leaving nothing but the stump, which was removed later Friday.

She said the crew was from a private company, and when she asked who authorized the tree removal, she was told it was it was Nunda Township.

“There was no notification [to the neighbors], no permission,” she said. “It’s one more example of ... him working against the community’s interests.”

The tree is not especially rare or old. It does, however, create a barrier between North East Shore Drive West in Holiday Hills and West Northeast Shore Drive in LeVilla Vaupell.

The subdivision turned its roads over to Nunda Township in the early 2000s, and Holiday Hills contracts with the township for snow removal and road maintenance, Parrish said, giving the township control over both sides of the road.

The LeVilla Vaupell subdivision “is not really private anymore” because its roads belong to the township, Parrish said. “They are a Nunda road connecting to Holiday Hills roads.”

As Holiday Hills “pseudo road commissioner, [Lesperance] believes he has jurisdiction to connect the two of them,” Parrish said. “I don’t believe that to be true.”

Mroz said she knocked on some of her neighbors’ doors early Friday to alert them to what was happening and said it seemed everyone felt “so defeated” by the tree’s stealthy removal after years of efforts to protect it.

Once sworn in, Parrish said it is his plan to either put a swinging gate at the line between the two entities or a speed bump to prevent speeders cutting through LeVilla Vaupell.