Batterson Park Pond Is Set to Reopen This Summer. You Still Won't Be Able to Swim in It.
Most of the testimony at Wednesday's Farmington Inland Wetlands Commission hearing was about a diesel travel center, two vernal pools, and a filtration system the applicant has never installed. But several of the people who stood up to speak were really talking about something a little farther downhill: Batterson Park Pond, and what is left of it.
The pond is the throughline of the Noble Energy fight, even though it is not, strictly, the parcel under review. The proposed travel center sits on roughly 86 acres at 8261 Fienemann Road, near the Slater Road line between Farmington and New Britain. Water from that land drains toward the wetlands the commission is weighing — and, eventually, toward the pond. And the pond, by the account of nearly everyone who mentioned it, is not in a position to absorb much more.
A pond Hartford owns and few can use
Batterson Park is owned by the City of Hartford, though the park and its pond lie outside the city, across New Britain and Farmington. For years it has carried a state advisory against swimming and wading; the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection lists it for fishing, not contact recreation.
Kathy Howell Talmont, who lives on the pond on Batterson Drive in New Britain, told the commission she had watched it decline for more than two decades. She described a park that once ran a swimming season from Memorial Day to Labor Day, a day camp that brought children down to the water, and water-ski shows — none of which the pond can support now. "I'd like to speak for the beleaguered, ignored, and abused Batterson Pond," she said, and called approval of the Noble project "the final nail in the coffin."
Hartford has spent the past several years trying to bring the park back. The Mercury covered the roughly $10 million revitalization effort in 2024, along with the debate over how much the rehabilitation could actually undo. But Rafina Backus Lee, who called in to Wednesday's hearing, said the limits of that work are about to become visible: the park is expected to reopen this summer, and swimming will not be allowed, because the pond could not be remediated to a standard that would permit it.
"Had something been done years before this regarding drainage and pollutants," she said, "perhaps we wouldn't be in this position today."
What the state's own numbers say
The case that the pond is already past its limit did not come from the residents alone. The intervener in the Noble proceeding — a petition the commission accepted in May — is Attorney Stephanie Roman, who owns property at 1292-1294 Slater Road in New Britain, and she built much of her presentation on public reports about the pond's watershed.
Roman pointed to a total maximum daily load analysis the state DEEP completed for Batterson Park Pond in 2004 — a regulatory accounting of how much pollution a water body can take. That analysis, she said, set a target of cutting the pond's nutrient loads roughly in half, a reduction that had not been achieved by 2024. She cited a more recent DEEP finding that development in the pond's watershed had risen from 25 percent to 28 percent, against research suggesting that water quality begins to degrade once a watershed crosses about 12 percent developed.
She also drew on an earlier study prepared for the City of Hartford by Bay State Environmental Consultants, which, by her account, found that the land closest to the pond poses the greatest threat to its water quality, and that drainage from the Deadwood Swamp area accounts for about two-thirds of the water reaching Batterson Park Pond. The Noble parcel, she argued, sits in exactly that contributing landscape.
Noble's team has not disputed that the development would increase stormwater reaching the pond. Its argument is that the redesigned system — the Contech "jellyfish" biofiltration units the engineer described Wednesday — would treat that runoff, including the dissolved pollutants earlier designs left untreated. Roman's expert, ecologist Sigrun Gadwa of Carya Ecological Services, told the commission she wanted to see the dissolved-nitrate removal data before accepting that, noting that nitrogen is among the pollutants of greatest concern for the pond.
Why the buffer matters
Underneath the engineering dispute is a question about what the undeveloped land between the pavement and the pond is actually doing. Gadwa argued that the forested ground now intercepts and filters runoff over a long flow path before it reaches the wetlands — roughly 250 feet of woods, in the case of the Slater Road outfall — and that replacing some of that forest with a fueling operation removes filtration the pond cannot easily replace.
That is the same logic residents kept returning to in plainer terms. Jon Schoenhorn, who chairs Farmington's Zoning Board of Appeals, warned that diesel, once it reaches a wetland, "stays for a very long time" and is "difficult, if not impossible, to remediate." Others raised the long-term reliability of pollution-control equipment that has to be maintained for decades, and the cumulative effect of one more impervious project on a watershed the state already considers strained.
Noble's owner, Michael Frisbie, has pushed back on the framing that his project is the threat residents describe, telling the commission the facility is "a mini travel plaza," not a truck stop, and pointing to the conservation easement the company has offered over most of the 86 acres. Whether that easement, and the new filtration, are enough to satisfy a commission charged with protecting the wetlands is the question now carried over to June 3.
What comes next
The Inland Wetlands Commission continued both the Noble hearing and Roman's intervener petition to its June 3 meeting. Revised plans are due first; written responses to the intervener's reports are due after that. The earliest the commission expects to vote is June 17.
Whatever it decides will land on a pond that has been losing ground for a generation, and that is about to reopen to the public under a rule that says, in effect, look but don't touch.
The Farmington Mercury's coverage of Farmington's wetlands and watercourses is supported by Farmington Storage of 155 Scott Swamp Road — the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air.