When the owners of 114 West Avon Road bought the place in January 2025, their first house, they were told the whole grassy bowl out back was theirs. It was a mowed field that flooded in wet weather and dried out in droughts, ringed by a loop of dirt track the previous owners had cut around it on ATVs and dirt bikes. So the new owners did what plenty of first-time homeowners do with a low spot that holds water: they decided to improve it. They dug down a few feet, hoping for a pond.
What they hit was sand. And what they had, it turned out, was a wetland.
That is the short version of the story the Conservation and Inland Wetlands Commission worked through on July 8, and it explains, better than any ordinance summary could, how an ordinary Farmington resident can cross the town's wetland rules without ever meaning to.
The longer version starts with a phone call. A neighbor to the west, who runs a Christmas tree farm, reported to the town that someone was disturbing a wetland. The complaint reached Bruce Cyr, Farmington's conservation and wetlands agent, the town got involved, and in September the owners were served with a cease-and-desist order. Which is where the landscape architect they eventually hired picks up the story.
The site is a genuinely odd piece of ground. It sits in a small captured watershed over a lens of pale, well-drained sand, the same kind of deposit a gravel operation has been mining down the road for generations. Water collects there and then disappears, sometimes rising when it has not rained, because the spot is fed by groundwater as much as by rainfall. "It's a vernal pool and then it's not," the landscape architect representing the owners told the commission. On the night of the meeting there was maybe half a foot of water in the center of it. In two days, he said, it could be gone.
That in-between quality is exactly what made the site a problem. It does not have classic wetland soils, which is why, the architect said, he and a colleague at New England Wetland Plants "kept going around and around" on how to treat it. The disturbed area runs about 6,000 square feet, with another 2,000 square feet of graded apron and slope around it: roughly 8,000 square feet in all.
The plan the owners brought is not a slap-on-the-wrist fix. It is a two-part restoration. First, stabilize the ground with four custom seed mixes formulated for the site's contradictory wet-and-dry conditions. Then plant 575 individual plants on top of the seed: 25 understory shrubs such as wild raisin, blueberry, dogwood, and swamp rose; 350 emergent wetland-edge and upland plants ringing the basin; and 200 aquatic emergent plants for the wet center, chosen because they can survive both standing water and stretches of drought. The banked sand the owners excavated, now growing over with native grasses, would be traded out for topsoil so the ground returns to something near its original grade. The owners have committed to at least three years of maintenance and, the architect noted, plan to do the labor themselves.
He offered one more detail, unprompted, about why they intend to see it through. The homeowner had committed, through a caveat on her mortgage, to stay in the house at least ten years. "She's in for the long haul," he said. "This is her first house. She loves it."
The commission has seen versions of this before. In April it approved a similar three-year restoration plan at another Farmington property where the work had gotten ahead of the permitting. It was also a milder matter than most of what has occupied the commission this year.
The commission's reaction was less a scolding than a bemused blessing. One commissioner, looking at a plan for a site that is half water hazard and half sand trap, offered the obvious suggestion. "I think you should get a tall fiberglass pole, put a flag on it, and stick it in the middle of this," he said. "You could make this a little pitch and putt." He wished the owners luck, said the finished project would be beautiful, and figured that had been the intent all along. "The zealousness probably got the best of them."
The architect had his own phrase for the property, one the commissioners seemed to enjoy: "a hinky, funny confluence of a bunch of almost contradictory conditions."
There was one careful thread about the neighbors. The pond, it turns out, spills onto two adjoining lots, and the commission wanted assurance that the restoration plantings would sit where they belonged. The commission's concern, one member noted, is not what the neighbor thinks but the condition of the regulated land. The architect said the owners have since been in contact with every adjoining neighbor, including the original complainant, who wrote to ask who was doing the work and whether the plants were native and non-invasive. They are, he said, and he intends to write her back. Letters of support, he told the commission, would come with the next submission.
The commission decided it did not need to walk the site, and it did not take a final vote. That was deliberate. Planting is a fall job, so nothing forces a decision now, and the commission asked the owners to return with a firm cost estimate and the neighbors' letters before it signs off. The cease-and-desist order stays in place until the restoration plan is approved, at which point it lifts. Which means the fastest way out of a wetland violation in Farmington is to spend the money putting the wetland back.
The vote is expected at the commission's next meeting.
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road, the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. A wetland restoration is a slow project measured in seasons, kept alive by somebody willing to maintain it for years. Farmington Storage understands the principle: some things are worth keeping under the right conditions, at institutional grade. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett has covered Farmington's land-use commissions long enough to know that the difference between a backyard and a wetland is often a few feet of sand. He is on his second coffee and has read the entire restoration plan. ☕
*The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the zoning board that runs late, the police log that is technically public record but functionally invisible, the wetlands commission quietly deciding what happens to the water under your yard. We publish slowly, deliberately, and without apology. Always last to breaking news, thorough about everything else. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰