If you’ve ever wondered how Bill Murray felt in the 1993 movie, Groundhog Day, the mystery is over for those who sat through or zoomed last night’s Conservation Commission continued public hearing, which is continued again to April 18th at Shepardson Center at 7pm. In the spirit of fairness, Vice-chair Mary Barton continued the hearing because the applicant, the peer reviewer and the town’s consulting engineer managed to take up 2 1/2 hours of the “must-be-out-by-10-pm" allotted time. And, in full disclosure, the applicant, peer reviewer, and town engineer needed all that time to spin a doozy of a tale that only lacked a unicorn parading across the stage at the end.
In
the movie, Bill Murray is a real jerk, and has to keep repeating
February 2nd until he learns to be a better person. That’s where we lose
this analogy, because no one deserves what this application has put us
through. Yes, the applicant is afforded every opportunity to demonstrate
the worthiness of an application, but we’re off in another realm now
for sure. The only good news of the evening was that the applicant’s
soil scientist was on vacation, so we didn’t have to suffer through that
presentation again…until next week.
What did we learn, or better yet, what is today’s fresh outrage?
- Debbie Seavey emailed a new set of plans from the applicant, dated 4/10/23, to the Intervenor’s attorney at 3:26pm on Tuesday, April 11, just 3.5 hours before the hearing started at 7pm. At 3:32pm, she emailed the town engineer’s comments, dated 4/10, that responded to Steve Trinkhaus’ March 28th supplemental report. Nothing like timely disclosure.
- The new plans include putting the residential portion of the property into a conservation easement, provided the applicant gets to build the big building it wants. No details on who would hold the easement or what kind of easement it would be.
- Reduced sq footage is now proposed for the smaller building, with less impact to the off-site vernal pools on the Benson Woods property.
- A new lighting plan was included that supposedly demonstrates no light is leaving the project area. Once all the buffer trees are planted, which also will magically suck up all the air pollution, there will be no light pollution or air pollution either. So acres of lights will be on, but you won’t see them, allegedly.
- According to John Milone, the President of MMI (which was acquired by SLR and operates under that new name) this facility isn’t necessarily a distribution center, and people should stop calling it that. Not sure why it would need loading bays or truck trailer storage if it isn’t a distribution center, but each design rejected as not feasible was rejected in part because there wasn’t enough tractor trailer storage or the building wasn’t big enough for the client’s purposes. Hmmm…if it looks like a butterfly, and flies like a butterfly…it’s probably a bog turtle.
- According to Attorney Fitzpatrick, the property is in the LI-200 zone, which is an industrial zone and exactly suits this project.
- One of the alternative proposals suggested by the Intervenor’s engineer, Steve Trinkhuas, isn’t an alternative because one corner of the building would stick into the residential zone and that’s not a permitted use, so it’s not an alternative. Apparently an entire building in the LI-200 zone that isn’t a permitted use is not a problem, though.
- Dennis Quinn, the herpetologist hired to do habitat assessment, really didn’t like people criticizing his work. He also thinks wetlands creation is a waste of time and the creatures living on the Timex site aren’t worth protecting. He didn’t actually check for creatures, because his employer didn’t want that, but if he did, he can promise there aren’t any worth saving. Bog turtles do not like Middlebury, by the way, and Quinn’s entire presentation was designed to convince the Commission a full biological assessment on the property isn’t necessary because no worthy creatures could possibly live on such a degraded site.
- Peer Reviewer George Logan didn’t wait for the applicant to respond to the intervenor’s concerns, he decided to tackle those for the applicant. The town being “neutral” on this application actually means Soil Scientist George Logan is tasked with inventing a storm water management plan for the applicant and then defending that design to the death, with the town’s consulting engineer providing back up. Both spent an enormous amount of time attacking Steve Trinkhaus’ intelligence and credentials. Don’t bother calling this a peer or independent review anymore: Mr. Logan stopped being an independent reviewer the moment he dreamed up a water quality treatment for the applicant. SLR happily accepted Logan’s suggestions, so all must now help each other perpetuate the myth. Attacking Steve Trinkhaus is all they have because they can’t actually defend their design.
- There are plenty of places to store snow according to SLR’s engineer, but there’s no actual plan that demonstrates the snow melt is captured adequately by the storm water treatment system and treated effectively before it is released into downstream receptors (Avalon Pond being first in line).
- The Peer Reviewer acknowledged that wetlands creation has a terrible success rate, but hey - it’s worth a try anyway because we shouldn’t give up on the environment over here while we’re wrecking it over there.
- In the applicant’s first several plans, the presence of invasive species was a reason to condemn wetlands to death. Now, all invasive plants property wide will be attacked vigorously, except that you can’t pull invasives in a wetland because that would disturb the wetland too much, so you have to cut the bad plants out by hand and then apply an herbicide to kill it. And that doesn’t normally work the first time, so you have to keep applying herbicide. Also, flattening an entire hill, filling in wetlands and disturbing another 7 acres of upland review area does not disturb wetlands too much because said wetlands are isolated, full of invasives, and only technically wetlands because the soil type meets the CT definition of a wetland. And besides, there are only 111.9 acres to work with on this property, so there is clearly no way to avoid filling in 0.3 acres of wetlands.
- The Commissioners finally started asking the applicant’s team and peer reviewer questions.
The
hearing is continued to Tuesday, April 18th at 7pm at Shepardson
Community Center. It appears that public comment time is over, so if you
would like to provide input to the Commission, please do so via email
to dseavey@middlebury-ct.org
