UNION TOWNSHIP, Ohio — Neighbors are complaining about Doug Evans, the owner of Evans Landscaping. Again.
Residents of the Pepper Ridge neighborhood packed a Union Township Trustee meeting on April 14. They criticized Evans for cutting down thousands of trees on a steep hillside that backs up to their homes, exposing them to wind, noise and erosion.
“The last thing I want to do is ruin a piece of property,” Evans said. “I can honestly say if I died tomorrow, I left this piece and every piece that I’ve touched in better shape than when I got it.”
WATCH: Doug Evans' first interview in 15 years
Evans invited the WCPO 9 I-Team to his property off Mt. Carmel Road near Newtown for a tour of the 500 acres (on just one side of the road) he has acquired. Evans said it is the first media interview he’s given in 15 years.
George Washington once owned some of this rolling hillside that straddles the Clermont and Hamilton County line. Views are so expansive that you can see fireworks from Kings Island in one direction, and the Cincinnati Reds in another.
“There hasn’t been a person that I took up here that either didn’t want to buy the place or move up here,” Evans said. “It’s one of the last undeveloped pieces of property inside I-275.”
Evans bought his newest 55-acre parcel, which is the subject of controversy, in January. He plans to grow crops on the land closest to Mt. Carmel Road, likely sweet corn this summer. He grew sunflowers on adjoining land last year, and he’s already growing wheat in other fields.
He plans to use the newly cleared hillside, which is in Clermont County, as pasture for cows and sheep.
“As fast as when we took the trees down, we went ahead and seeded it right back so there wouldn’t really be any erosion,” Evans said.
But that’s not how neighbors see it.
“We have witnessed, by way of Doug Evans again, the total destruction of all of the land growth and tree growth behind Pepper Ridge subdivision,” resident John Harbeson said at the April 14 Union Township meeting. “The creek isn’t there anymore. There are no trees. There are no bushes. There are no stones. It’s all dirt. It has been filled in totally.”
The Clermont County Building Department posted a stop-work order at the site on April 8 for clearing trees and vegetation without a permit.
“The parcel has been cleared completely with no erosion & sediment controls in place. This includes work in and through an intermittent stream that runs east to west across the northern part of the property. There were crews out with heavy equipment moving dirt today. Some of the work was being done at the base of the hill. There are concerns about them disturbing the toe of the slope,” a Clermont County inspector wrote after his March 26 visit.
Evans is required to apply for a county permit and submit a storm water pollution prevention plan showing how erosion and sediment runoff will be controlled on site, and apply for a separate Ohio EPA construction general permit, according to the county violation report.
But Evans defended his work and said the neighbors should appreciate his beautification efforts and their new view of the valley.
“I guess I’d much rather be in this position here, where somebody is upset that I’m putting a farm in, than somebody upset that I put a data center in here,” Evans said.
'I'm trying to make things nice.'
Over the years, Evans has drawn the attention, and irritation, of prosecutors and elected officials.
A jury in December 2018 found Evans and his company, Evans Landscaping, guilty of defrauding the City of Cincinnati and the state of Ohio by taking millions in demolition work designated for minority and small business contractors.
Evans was released from prison after serving six months of a 21-month sentence for minority contracting fraud in 2021.
Since then, he's faced multiple legal battles, including accusations from Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost.
Yost sued Evans in 2021 in the hopes of resolving Evans' decades worth of environmental violations. Years later, health officials were still complaining about buried construction waste, unpermitted work, lack of cleanup and pollution seeping into the Little Miami River at three Evans facilities near Newtown.
Evans agreed to pay a new $35,000 fine to settle his years-long fight with Yost in January.
This isn’t the first time neighbors have accused Evans of doing unpermitted work on Mt. Carmel Road.
Neighbor Jason Gordon, who lives on an adjoining parcel, sued Evans in 2020, accusing him of ruining his “slice of paradise” by transforming 11 acres of farmland he bought from an elderly neighbor into an industrial park.
A Clermont County judge sided with Gordon and ordered Evans to pay $900,000 in damages and penalties, writing in a July 2025 order that his company, Mt. Carmel Farms, engaged in “deliberate fraud.” That ruling is now under appeal.
“Everything I had been saying for years was proven to be true,” Gordon said at the April 14 Union Township Trustee meeting. “This is no longer just about my property. This is about a repeated pattern of non-enforcement that has allowed unlawful development to take hold and expand … residents should not have to file lawsuits to get their government to do its job."
Evans said he did not watch that meeting. But he met with two residents of Pepper Ridge recently.
“I have met two of them up there. They were nice to me. I put them in the tractor with me, the tractor has a buddy seat,” Evans said.
When asked if he persuaded them, Evans said, “I mean, I hope I do. You know I’m always at my office if somebody wants to talk, if somebody wants to understand it.”
For comparison, Evans showed WCPO the first parcels of property that he purchased here 15 years ago. He said he cleared that land in a similar way to the current hillside and has never experienced erosion or runoff.
That land is now grassy hillsides dotted with trees. There are several ponds filled with fish and expansive views. He said he lets the grass grow longer in the spring for wild turkeys to lay eggs and in the fall for baby deer.
His land overlooks the confluence of the Little Miami and East Fork Little Miami Rivers, where the loudest sounds don’t come from traffic, but conversations that echo upward from passing canoers, he said.
“It had no view; it was just a jumbled-up mess with honeysuckle everywhere,” Evans said. “I micromanaged this, and it turned out pretty good.”
Wild turkeys and red-tailed hawks, coyotes and bobcats, and even a rumored black bear live here, and across the railroad tracks, Evans sees nesting pairs of bald eagles.
On other parts of the land, Evans keeps beehives, 300 chickens, and raises cows, sheep and pigs. His two sons live in separate houses on this land, and he hopes one day his daughter will move here and perhaps other relatives.
“I don’t want to have issues with them (neighbors),” Evans said. “I’m trying to make things nice, especially since my kids live here.”
The hillside he just cleared on the newly acquired parcel below Pepper Ridge was filled with invasive honeysuckle and locust trees, and scrub trees such as cedars and box elders, he said.
Jay Butcher, co-owner of Madison Tree Care & Landscaping, fishes and hunts on this land and agreed with Evans.
“There is a ton of honeysuckle in there, and that is not an established older forest,” Butcher said, looking at another part of the hillside that Evans doesn’t own, and is still woodlands.
“That’s not like I’m condoning cutting everything down, but if you have a purpose and if you do it in a way that has some dignity and some respect and does have a thought process,” Butcher said.
After the trees were removed, Evans seeded the hillside as pastureland, and late last week, the green sprouts were showing.
“This only got planted three weeks ago, and already you can loosely see the vision of what that will turn into,” Butcher said. “I think it will be strikingly beautiful once it settles in and is given time."
'Doug Evans has a dark cloud over him.'
Evans owns a massive amount of land throughout Clermont and Hamilton counties. He is now expanding his portfolio into Brown County, where Evans Farm Properties LLC bought parcels totaling more than 1,000 acres.
But Evans said he never encountered problems with permitting or zoning issues elsewhere, except for this land off Mt. Carmel Road.
“When I have other pieces of property in other places, I don’t have any issues,” Evans said.
Union Township sued Evans in 2023 over zoning violations related to the 11 “unauthorized commercial structures on the property,” that resembled big red barns. Nine were built in Union Township on land zoned for estate residential, which did not allow active commercial buildings such as an auto mechanics shop, according to the lawsuit.
Three years later, the township settled with Evans in January. Evans agreed to pay a $5,000 fine. And the township conditionally rezoned the land as a planned development district, allowing landscaping, agriculture, a nursery, residential, and personal indoor storage, only if Clermont County issued permits for the property.
The experience left some township trustees suspicious of Evans.
“If there is anything, anything we can do at the township level to stop this, I don’t suppose we can restore 100-year-old trees, but if there is anything we can do, we will do it,” said Union Township Trustee John Becker at the April 14 meeting.
Trustee Joe Dills explained to angry neighbors that Evans did not violate any township zoning rules by cutting down trees on his new property.
“The problem is Doug Evans has a dark cloud over him, and he’s affecting all of you, I know,” Dills said. “We are watching it like a hawk … if anything illegal is done on that property, we’re going to slap him with every right that we are allowed, to the fullest extent.”
Anderson Township officials also confirmed that Evans broke no rules by clearing trees or adding a gravel road on his new property, because it is being used for agricultural purposes.
“We determined that clearing the property was not a zoning violation,” said Paul Drury, director of planning and zoning for Anderson Township. “The Township did forward the complaint to Hamilton County Soil and Water.”
A spokesperson for Hamilton County Soil and Water said grading land for farm activity is allowed there. But they would investigate any concerns regarding agricultural pollution, including sediment runoff.
“During my site visit on April 14, 2026, I observed areas being stabilized via hydroseeding with a pasture seed mix … We discussed some areas with erosion and provided guidance on the best ways to mitigate and repair the erosion,” wrote Hamilton County Conservation District urban technician Aaron Habig, in an email that Evans provided to WCPO, confirming this land is exempt from earthworks regulations.
But Anderson Township Trustee Tom Hodges is still wary.
“I think he had a well-earned reputation for somebody who needs to be watched a little closer than others,” Hodges said, noting the township will closely monitor the site.
Meanwhile, the Clermont County Building Department took more enforcement action this week. It issued a second notice of violation, this time for water management and sediment control regulations, due to earth-disturbing activity on the property. The violation was sent to Evans by certified mail on April 21, according to a county spokesperson.
"The building department is working with our Clermont Soil and Water Conservation District, Ohio EPA, and the county prosecutor to determine the next level of enforcement, as necessary,” according to county spokesperson Ursula Miller on April 20.
An Ohio EPA inspector will also be on site Friday, said Evans, who insisted he did not disturb a stream on the hillside.
“I didn’t reroute any stream. I didn’t reroute anything,” Evans said. “The only thing I did was take out honeysuckle and some trees. I put a tractor on it and graded it back, and I seeded it.”
He provided a WCPO a letter from professional engineer Todd Cluxton, stating that seeding of the site has been completed and a silt fence erected, “I am assisting Mr. Evans with providing any documents that the (Clermont) county is requiring to resolve this issue.”
“Because ... it is zoned agriculture, it was unclear to Mr. Evans that sediment and erosion control would be required by the county. It’s common that it is needed for a commercial project, but not agricultural,” Cluxton wrote.
But Bradford Grant, who lives in the Pepper Ridge neighborhood and has a background in conservation planning and forestry silviculture, said Evans did, in fact, need a Clermont County permit for the tree removal.
“Specifically, they pulled the trees in a process called grubbing. That’s when you pull the tree out, and all the root system comes out,” Grant said. “That moves it from an agricultural exemption to heavy development because of the soil disturbing process … because of the risk of landslide and erosion and soil slippage.”
Since the hillside was stripped, he said neighbors are experiencing more intense wind that has already uprooted numerous trees.
“The trees themselves and the roots in particular act as an anchoring point,” Grant said. “When you have a full forested area, that prevents those slide issues that you would otherwise potentially see … in the Cincinnati area it’s one of the most expensive remediation processes to alleviate, when you have these types of landslides.”
Grant has done turbidity testing in the stream at the top and bottom of the hill to measure the amount of soil or silt in the water and discovered results, “beyond that range where the Ohio EPA would act.”
“That gives you a good textualization to understand how much is running off and how much erosion is already occurring,” Grant said.
Over the past few weeks, Grant shared his findings at public meetings in Union Township and with commissioners in Clermont and Hamilton counties.
But Evans is resolute that he is improving his property, and if neighbors hear his long-term vision, they will understand.
“Well, let’s put it this way. I sleep pretty good at night,” Evans said.
Evans performed the tractor work on the hillside himself and said there is a level area of 300 to 400 feet behind Pepper Ridge before it becomes relatively steep. He also left 100 feet of woodlands on the hill undisturbed.
“I’m probably a little misunderstood on things, and that’s alright,” Evans said. “I can’t be friends with everybody. But I’d like to be.”
