Noble Energy Real Estate Holdings wants to build what it calls a travel center, and what its neighbors call a truck stop, plus an 18,000-square-foot warehouse at 8261 Fienemann Road in Farmington, beside Batterson Park Pond, the public pond on the New Britain line. On Tuesday night, Farmington's nine-member Town Council told the planning board, in plain language and without a single dissenting vote, that it does not want the rules rewritten to allow it.
It was not the only one. On a different parcel, with a different developer, the council voted the same way again the same night.
"Interesting we have these two proposals tonight at the same evening," Chair Brian Connolly (D, at-large) said, near the end of a meeting that had opened with a rowing proclamation and a Police Officer of the Year award and closed with the elected body of a Connecticut town of 26,000 going firmly on the record against two separate development applications. By the time The Farmington Mercury arrives, the votes are counted and the reasoning is on the transcript. Both were unanimous. Both were negative.
What the council actually did, and what it did not
Here is the part worth being precise about, because the council itself spent much of the night being precise about it: neither vote stops either project.
What the council acted on were two referrals under Connecticut General Statute 8-23, sent over from the Town Plan and Zoning Commission, the TPZ. Each asked the council to weigh in on proposed amendments to Farmington's Plan of Conservation and Development, the POCD, the long-range document that says what the town wants its land used for. The council's only job was to endorse the changes, reject them, or stay silent. It rejected both.
"Regardless of what you say, this is a TPZ decision. This is not your decision," Town Manager Kathleen Blonski told the council before the first vote, heading off a misunderstanding that had clearly traveled through the neighborhoods. "There's some comment that was made that this would be your decision. This is your decision to make a referral."
So the referrals are advisory. The TPZ holds the binding votes, and a separate body, the Conservation and Inland Wetlands Commission, holds its own. What changed Tuesday is that the elected council, which had stayed a procedural step removed from the truck-stop fight while it played out in front of the appointed commissions, said where it stands. On a council that runs five Democrats to four Republicans, both votes were unanimous. On both, it stands at no.
The truck stop, and the room
The Noble Energy application is the one that filled the chamber. One resident after another came to the podium to oppose it, from Farmington and from neighboring New Britain, and the council let the comment period run.
Katie Munzweiss, who said she lives about a mile from the site on Alexander Road in New Britain and closed on her home two months ago, asked the council to picture the route to school. "I can't imagine now children walking to and from school with semi-trailers and big rigs on the road with them," she said. "There is no price tag that you can put on my children and you can put on my neighbors."
Otis Murray, a sophomore at Farmington High School who said Connolly had visited his class a few weeks earlier, opposed it too. "We have money that we do not need to spend on this truck stop that we can use to put forward to make this town better," he said.
The opposition arrived with paperwork. Stephanie Roman, who owns property on Slater Road in New Britain and has intervened in the wetlands case, told the council more than 500 people had signed a petition on change.org against the project. Melinda Pritz, of Nadia's Way, said a second petition she started had reached 550 signatures.
When the council's turn came, the members did not hide where they were. Bruce Polsky (D, 1st District), taking the second pass that the chair allowed each member, was the bluntest. "There is absolute clarity beyond a reasonable doubt that the town does not want this," he said. "So I'm a hard no on this going forward. This is just beyond the pale for us."
Council member Bill Beckert (D, 2nd District) went at the developer's central claim: that Fienemann Road, which the applicant says carries more than 10,000 vehicles a day, is busy enough to suit commercial use. Beckert said he doubted the count, and doubted the logic regardless. "Is it a good idea to add truck traffic?" he asked. "And you said it's a 24-hour day, because it's going to be evening deliveries and morning taking off."
Dave Wlodkowski (D, 1st District), who grew up in New Britain off Farmington Avenue and came to Batterson Park as a kid, tied his vote to the pond's turnaround. "We're at a great spot right now with the renovation of Batterson Park," he said. "Maybe the water quality gets even better. And I just think that this is just the wrong step in the direction that we want to go in." Nadine Canto (R, 1st District), who said she has lived near Batterson Park her whole life, wanted the money spent on the park itself.
Connolly closed the discussion before the motion. "There's language changes that don't help the town," he said. "They help the piece of property. And we're here to represent and protect and serve the town. So I am also a hard no on this one." The vote that followed was unanimous.
The other one
The application that did not fill the room was National Land Holdings, LLC, which is asking the town to loosen POCD language on parcels at 1179 Farmington Avenue and portions of 2 and 3 Bridgewater Road to allow more residential units, with fewer open-space and trail requirements. Connolly described it from the dais as an apartment and condo project. The Mercury has not written about this one before. The council rejected it first, and with the same unanimity.
Polsky said he served on the planning commission when this same developer brought the project for an informal review and was turned away, and he did not soften the second look. "It's been 70 years since the flood of '55, and that 100-year flood line is there," he said of the riverside parcels. "It would be galactically stupid to let this thing go ahead."
Keith Vibert (R, 2nd District), a former TPZ member, framed it as the easy call of the two. "A situation like this, where we would need to grant a change to allow it, is an easy one, in my opinion, for us to just say no," he said. "We're not doing anything wrong. We're not changing anything to affect anyone. We're just saying no. This is our rule. We're sticking by our rule, and we don't want to go forward with it." Beckert, who said he sat on planning and zoning in 2007 when that area's POCD language was written, remembered the reasoning behind it. "There was concern about the river, how wet it is," he said.
Council member Patricia Boye-Williams (D, 2nd District) made the argument that ran underneath both votes, and made the motion on both. The town is at the very beginning of a full, roughly two-year rewrite of its POCD, Town Planner Shannon Rutherford told the council, with adoption targeted for the end of 2027. To Boye-Williams, that was the reason to reject piecemeal changes now. "The plan of conservation and development needs to be considered on a holistic basis," she said, "town-wide, not site by site, not on an applicant-by-applicant basis."
What happens next
The votes are referrals, so the next moves belong to other boards. The TPZ has scheduled its own public hearing on the National Land Holdings application for July 13. The Noble Energy truck stop is in front of the Conservation and Inland Wetlands Commission, where the public hearing has been continued to June 17, and the TPZ has a separate rezoning hearing on the Noble application on its calendar. In her report from the wetlands commission, Boye-Williams told the council the Noble plan had been revised again: the warehouse cut from 20,000 to 18,000 square feet, the refueling area from 10,000 to 8,400, the restaurant dropped, and roughly 75 acres proposed for a conservation easement. The applicant, she said, keeps filing new material, which is why the hearing keeps getting pushed.
None of that is settled. What is settled is that the council has now said, on the record and twice, that it does not want either change written into the plan.
Also on the agenda
The two referrals ran long, but they were not the whole night.
The council appointed the voting members of its new Fire Station Building Committee: Brenda Bergeron, who recently retired as the state's deputy commissioner for emergency management and homeland security, as chair, alongside Ted Sanford of Sanford & Hawley and the Historic District Commission, and Tim Perra of Stanley Black & Decker. It set a public hearing on the long-running Meadow Road sidewalk project for July 14 at 7 p.m., the next required step after the council gave staff direction in May to proceed with Option 2. And Connolly noted that the year's tax-rate increase had come down from a planned 3.5 percent to 2.79 percent, after the town split the state aid it received between cutting the rate and adding to its fund balance.
The night also closed the loop on the Tinty property, where the town manager delivered the legal opinion confirming that a deed covenant bars a cemetery there. The council treated the matter as settled; several residents, including a niece of Donald Tinty, whose family donated the land, came to ask for a permanent guarantee anyway. That is its own story.
And the meeting opened the way Farmington meetings tend to: Detective Zachary Martin was named the town's 2026 Police Officer of the Year, the council handed Eileen Shin a $1,500 Stephen A. Fliss scholarship on her way to UConn, and it proclaimed a day for the Farmington High School girls varsity rowing boat, which won a state championship. Slow news, done right, still has room for a rowing team.
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road, the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. A plan of conservation and development is a town deciding what it wants to keep, and on what terms. Farmington Storage works on the same principle, at a smaller scale and a steadier temperature. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett has covered Farmington's Town Council long enough to know the difference between a vote that decides something and a vote that tells you where everyone stands. Tuesday's were the second kind. He is on his second coffee and has read all three Bridgewater Road parcels into the record. ☕
*The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the zoning referral that takes ninety minutes, the police log that is technically public record but that you'd never find unless someone typed it up, the board of education vote that decides what your kids learn next year. We publish slowly, deliberately, and without apology. We are always last to breaking news, and thorough about everything else. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰