SUNDERLAND — New England Greenscape Inc. plans to move just 3.3 miles farther into town at 31 Garage Road.
On Wednesday, the Zoning Board of Appeals approved a special permit for Morse & Morse Realty LLC to operate a landscaping business on 31 Garage Road, a short drive from New England Greenscape’s current location at 509 Hadley Road. New England Greenscape owners Steve and Kristen Morse also own Morse & Morse Realty LLC, with Steve Morse explaining their realty company will lease to their landscaping company as a tenant.
Northeast Tree Care currently runs a landscape construction company at the 31 Garage Road site but plans to move to an 18-acre property at 198 Mill Village Road in Deerfield.
The property at 31 Garage Road is listed on Lamacchia Realty’s website for $485,000. According to the listing, the 3,600-square-foot property includes a commercial garage and a shop built in 1970 with two offices, a break room and bathrooms. According to Steve Morse, 31 Garage Road is “better suited for our business” due to the bathrooms, offices and garage compared to 509 Hadley Road, the birthplace of the business 29 years ago.
Steve Morse told the ZBA that New England Greenscape focuses on lawn mowing, landscape construction, tree work, snow plowing, landscape maintenance, shrub work and mulching. He clarified that the business does not process lumber on site.
Residents Heidi Bauer-Clapp and Susan Triolo shared concerns regarding potential noise from the landscaping company outside business hours. For Bauer-Clapp, the noise of trucks starting up in the morning is “the bigger disturbance.”
“It’s not really what’s happening in the building, it’s what’s happening in the lot that gets you ready to start the day that creates the noise for the neighborhood,” Bauer-Clapp said.
In response, Morse agreed to not start up his seven vehicles, including a dump truck and two 1-ton trucks, until their business hours start. He plans to emulate the business’ current hours, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturdays.
“We’ll spend very little time [at 31 Garage Road],” Morse said. “All of our work is away from there.”
Among the special permit’s conditions is a stipulation that the hours of operation and deliveries of mulch or stones stay within the “standard” hours of operation, or the business’ hours, with an exception for snow plowing off site. “No midnight deliveries,” ZBA Chair Steve Krol clarified.
Krol said the board’s “biggest concern” with Northeast Tree Care during its occupancy at 31 Garage Road has been its outside storage of logs. Therefore, the special permit for New England Greenscape also prohibits log storage and wood processing, chipping “or uses that would generate noise prohibited under our noise bylaw.”
According to Krol, the process of preparing and filing the paperwork with the town clerk will likely take 14 days, so he estimated that New England Greenscape will receive its permit on Oct. 7. Morse asked Krol about shortening the timeline, considering he and his wife hope to close on the property by the end of September and open at the new location in October. However, Krol said speeding up the process would be difficult.
