As Tuesday’s Conservation Commission meeting approaches (2/28 @7:30pm at Shepardson Community Center and on Zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/
- The Peer Reviewer hired by the town has completed his report.
- The experts hired by the MSTA have reviewed this report and are prepared to reply at Tuesday’s meeting.
- We anticipate the Conservation Commission making a decision on Tuesday night, so it is critical that people are at the meeting or watching on Zoom. If the Commission approves this project, they’ll have to do it with everyone watching.
- If you want to submit your objection to
the Conservation Commission, please send an email addressed to the
Conservation Commission, ℅ of the MSTA at middlebury.small.town.
alliance@gmail.com. The Wetlands Officer only works on Wednesday mornings, so we’ll hand in letters in person on Tuesday night to ensure they are included in the record. We’ll take printed out or handwritten letters as well as long as you can get them to one of us by Tuesday afternoon at 4pm. Send us a heads up via email or FB, and we’ll make arrangements to connect with you.
- No full biological assessment of the Timex property has been made (meaning no one went looking for endangered plants or animals). The application was initially submitted in November, so everything would have been hibernating at that point anyway. However, the MSTA made arrangements for a herpetologist to evaluate potential habitats (ribbon snake in particular), and we were denied access to the property to complete this evaluation. The real price of the denial is once again born by Middlebury residents: the town missed a golden opportunity to gather yet another layer of information critical to making an informed decision on the impact of approving this project. If the town is going to approve the complete destruction of wetlands, it should have at least evaluated what plants and animals live there first. The Natural Diversity Data Base (NDDB) identifies threatened species very near to the Timex property, and the applicant argued the NDDB didn’t show anything of concern on the property. While this is technically true, the NDDB is a look backwards at what has been found in the past. If no one ever evaluated the Timex property for endangered plants or animals, the NDDB would be incomplete because no one ever looked, not because there isn’t anything important on site. If the town accepts the applicant’s argument that there is nothing to look for, the town is turning a blind eye to willful habitat destruction and further endangering the plants and animals it has a duty to protect. This is simply unacceptable from the MSTA’s point of view, and it demonstrates a complete failure to govern properly.
