Cherry Hill residents want to know why acres of trees were cut down for new houses

Longtime neighbors Christina Bartnikowski and Jamie Gordon could hear the trees being cut down, one after another.

“It was hard living here while the trees were hitting the ground,” Gordon said.

“Listening to that was so depressing,” Bartnikowski said.

Along with other residents of Cherry Hill’s Kressonshire neighborhood, the two women are still stunned that the heart of a densely wooded 14-acre tract along Kresson Road just east of I-295 has been cut down and carted away, creating a gap in what had long been a cherished landscape, even in winter.

“Now it looks like a moonscape,” said Randy Acorcey, who lives nearby and documented the tree-cutting with photographs over six months in 2021.

Locals are particularly perplexed that so many large, seemingly healthy trees were taken down despite the Cherry Hill planning board’s call — after considerable pressure from the community — for a more judicious culling of the woods as a condition for approving construction of 16 single-family houses on the site.

“There was a clear understanding both in writing and verbally that [the developer] was not going to clear-cut the property,” said Steve Weinberg, who has lived in Kressonshire since 1984.

“Rather than just taking trees out for the new road and the utilities, they took out everything,” he said. “To me it looks like they cleared the building lots. They weren’t supposed to do that until the lots were sold, and they had building permits.”

Weinberg wants the township to explain how the scope of tree-cutting so dramatically exceeded expectations and determine “what we can do so this doesn’t happen again.”

The developer, MiPro, a subsidiary of Procacci Homes, is marketing the new neighborhood as Kresson Estates. After repeated calls, a MiPro representative invited a reporter to submit questions by email, but the company did not respond.

Although the township, after looking into neighbors’ complaints, imposed a moratorium on further tree cutting at the site on Nov. 15, “what the developer proposed, and probably, what they’ve done, is completely in line with our ordinance,” said Erin Gill, Cherry Hill’s business administrator. The township is still reviewing the matter.

Home to nearly 75,000 people, the 24-square-mile township has few remaining sizable parcels that could be developed into single-family houses — certainly nothing on the scale of the dozens in the 1950s and ‘60s that transformed a community of farms and rural hamlets into South Jersey’s signature suburb.

In recent years, much of the major development in Cherry Hill has involved the often-controversial repurposing of older commercial properties, including a portion of the Barclay Farms Shopping Center, as well as the construction of large rental complexes on underused sites such as the former Victory Refrigeration facility in the Woodcrest section.

The township also has used some of the $400,000 it collects annually as a dedicated open space tax to help purchase and preserve a number of privately owned parcels, including the Kingston Swim Club and a former Masonic Lodge property near Haddonfield-Berlin Road in 2020.

Kressonshire residents said Cherry Hill’s efforts to conserve open space, as well as regional concerns about ongoing tree loss due to disease, extreme weather, and invasive pests, render what occurred along Kresson Road even more difficult to fathom.

So does the fact that the scope of the site preparation work was readily apparent to anyone traveling that stretch of Kresson Road for months before township officials said they were made fully aware of concerns about the impact of the tree removal in November.

Gill described open-space preservation as one of Cherry Hill’s top priorities. “If there is a space that is open or [poised to undergo] a significant change in use, we do our best to step in,” she said. “If it’s a private sale and it’s zoned residential, we will negotiate to get as much open space in the form of easements, buffers, and storm water drainage areas, as possible.”

The location of Kresson Estates — adjacent to Woodcrest’s 75-acre Magic Forest conservation area — would seem to have made it a good candidate for preservation. But township officials said there are limits to what a municipality can expect, let alone, extract, in the way of concessions from an owner seeking to build what the property has been zoned for.

In 2018, the planning board did negotiate with MiPro to reduce the number of proposed houses from 27 to 16, to set aside two lots as storm water drainage basins, and to earmark a third as additional open space. The board also required that the developer impose deed restrictions to preserve the woods that border the rear of the building lots on both the east and west sides of Kresson Estates.

A house and an outbuilding were torn down to prepare for the redevelopment of the property.

Michael Procacci, the firm’s vice president, told Sun Newspapers in 2018 that the prices of the new homes would likely range from $500,000 to $650,000 but could rise depending on the options and modifications preferred by the buyer.

“The planning board went above and beyond,” Michelle Caffrey, the township’s director of communications, said during an interview with Gill and Cosmas Diamantis, director of community development, at town hall.

Cherry Hill has “a pretty robust program to preserve and replace trees,” said Diamantis, who noted that the township does not prohibit removing trees that are dead, diseased, too close to, or within the footprint of a proposed home.

He also said Cherry Hill’s municipal code requirements governing trees will be reviewed.

Grading home sites is often essential for drainage or other purposes and can necessitate unanticipated tree-cutting, Diamantis said. And according to Gill, it may turn out that trees removed from building lots before construction permits were issued would have been removed in any case.

“The Kresson Road site was [already] a very oddly graded property, and a very tough property to work with,” Diamantis said. “They did move some dirt around, which can expose tree roots, and that is something [the township] also has to take into consideration.”

The township “hasn’t confirmed that trees were removed improperly,” Caffrey said. “We don’t have all the facts yet.”

In later emails, she said Cherry Hill’s engineering department “was aware that site work had commenced and did have engineering inspectors on-site as construction began.”

Caffrey also said a consulting engineer would review the tree removal, after which the township would “assess the process involved and how it can be improved. If it is found that trees were removed prematurely, the next conversation will be with the developer as to how we will remedy the situation, including but not limited to additional re-plantings.”

Said Diamantis: “We still have a long way to go to see what this site will actually look like.”

No abundance of new trees or lavish landscaping can make up for the loss, at least in the short term, said Acorcey, a member of Cherry Hill’s historical commission.

“It’s going to take many, many years,” he said. “I am not a tree hugger by any stretch. But I do appreciate what woods and wooded areas do for us. I’m just glad I made a pictorial record of what it was like.”