If you missed Tuesday night’s Conservation Commission public hearing, you missed a grand show. Granted, the seats were more comfortable and the sound was definitely better, but several people got shut out of the Zoom broadcast (again, limited to 100 participants) and the public got shut out of its own public hearing. Vice Chair Mary Barton asked the applicant, peer reviewer & town engineer, and intervenor to all be finished speaking by 8:30pm to allow the public an hour of time to talk before everyone was supposed to be out of the auditorium at 9:30pm. At 8:30pm, the applicant was still shuffling speakers through a complete re-presentation of the entire application (with cute butterfly pictures for emphasis), and the peer reviewer & town engineer hadn’t even started their suddenly lengthy comments. The intervenor’s attorney and only one of its experts spoke briefly for 15 minutes to rebut the still-not-in-compliance-with-DEP-regs stormwater management plan, and then stepped aside to let the public speak. In total, the public got only about 35 minutes of time to speak, so the hearing was recessed until April 4th at 7pm at PHS.
Key takeaways from the evening:
• The applicant’s soil scientist spent an extraordinary amount of time degrading the quality of the wetlands on the property as not being worthy of their title, trying to imply that Middlebury’s wetlands regulations only apply to higher class wetlands.
• The applicant refused site access to the MSTA’s herpetologist, but then turned around and hired him to assess ribbon snake habitat on the property he was formally denied access to. Shockingly (not really), there is suitable habitat for ribbon snakes on the Timex property, but since the applicant only asked for snake assessment, the herpetologist ignored all the other creatures that might live in all the “Federal” wetlands on the property. He didn’t ignore the vernal pools over on the Benson Woods (BW) side, however, and spent all of his time shaming any future development at BW for harming wood frogs and salamanders. Don’t get confused: this was not a full biological assessment, it was simply a habitat assessment, and the attempted “look over at them and not at what we’re doing” didn’t fool anyone in the audience. We also noticed that no 700 ft impact boundary was drawn around the Timex vernal pool the peer reviewer mentioned.
• The peer reviewer originally identified the potential vernal pools at BW, noting that the water for these pools came from the Timex property. This was confirmed by the MSTA’s soil scientist, with the comment that the watershed on the Timex property was likely larger than what it was being credited as. The applicant’s engineer jumped all over this in February, offering to provide water from the site to these potential pools so development didn’t de-water them. Now that we know those are high quality vernal pools (thank you, herpetologist), the herpetologist then recommended removing the level spreader that would have provided water to the pools. Good thing, too, because the real water quality calculations show contaminates are not being removed at the levels required by the state. But we’re still left with the Timex re-development dewatering the very excellent vernal pools at BW.
• The applicant’s engineer, the peer reviewer (a soil scientist, not an engineer), and the town’s consulting engineer all suffer from the same disease: that storm water management design is like Legos...everyone can be a master builder using any random blocks they like. How any of them could say with a straight face that the plan NOW complies with CT DEP regulations is laughable: it was supposed to comply from the very beginning, they’re on like revision #4 or #5, and it still doesn’t comply because they’re mixing and matching pieces that don’t go together. The town’s consulting engineer was fine with the first plan...no wait, now the second one is also fine…OK, the third is fine…and the 4th is also good. Which is it? And why should we believe any of it if the application didn’t comply from the very start? If you think too hard about this, you’ll realize that if the MSTA hadn’t hired the area’s leading storm water management and water quality expert, the applicant would have gotten away with building a system that utterly failed to comply with state regulations and just passed pollution untreated downstream to Avalon Farms, Benson Woods, and Kissawaug Swamp.
• The most astonishing part of the applicant’s presentation was the approximately 7 minute discussion of feasible and prudent alternatives. By this time, the audience was in a foul mood, and the presenter rushed through his part of the filibuster. Mind you, the whole purpose of the public hearing was because the Conservation Commission determined this project would have “significant impact” on wetlands, and the applicant was therefore obligated to provide feasible and prudent alternatives that wouldn’t harm wetlands. We got almost 2 hours of re-presentation of the original proposal that triggered this finding, and about a sneeze’s worth of possible alternatives. What we did hear and see was a very narrow interpretation of wetlands impact, meaning just the actual wetland boundaries were considered when moving buildings around to avoid impact, and not the more than 300,000 sq ft of upland review area that is also regulated. And now we know, thank you herpetologist, that the 100’ upland review area should really be more like 700’-3000’ feet because frogs can hop, so building right up to the very edge of the actual wetlands defies the concept of no impact (sort of like your kids not actually touching each other in the back seat).
• Finally, the applicant now threatens an affordable housing development on the residential portion of the Timex property if he can’t destroy wetlands to build his 720,000 sq ft building. This threat actually insults anyone who might need affordable housing: if the existing neighboring residential properties don’t want to live next to a distribution facility, why would we ask anyone needing affordable housing to live even closer? Is the implication that, like the “isolated state" wetlands, someone with a lesser income is less valuable?
The public hearing was recessed until Tuesday, April 4th at 7pm. This means the public should finally get time to speak, and you won’t have to sit through presentations first. There is plenty to complain about this application, and we’re looking forward to the opportunity to complain loudly. Please join us.
