Farmington Wetlands Commission Accepts Intervener Petition in Noble Energy Hearing
The 86-acre parcel where Fienemann Road meets Slater Road and the I-84 ramps drains, by way of a culverted channel under Fienemann, into Batterson Park Pond — Hartford-owned, listed by the state as an impaired water body, and the subject of a $10 million state-funded restoration whose trails and recreational area the Farmington Conservation and Inland Wetlands Commission has been approving in earlier proceedings. Wednesday night, the same commission convened to hear Noble Energy Real Estate Holdings' continuing application to put a travel center, an 18,000-square-foot warehouse, and a diesel fueling facility on the upstream edge of that watershed.
The hearing's first procedural act was a vote. Chair Ned Stachen asked the commission to accept the intervener petition Stephanie Roman had filed a week earlier under Connecticut General Statute §22a-19 — a petition the town attorney had reviewed and described as "in order." The motion passed unanimously. Roman, who lives at 1292-1294 Slater Road in New Britain and who had submitted a five-page written opposition on April 8, opened her presentation with a sentence drawn nearly verbatim from the statute under which she had filed.
"This commission may deny an application when a project is likely to harm natural resources, and the evidence shows that this one will."
§22a-19 is the provision of the Connecticut Environmental Protection Act that allows any person to intervene in an administrative proceeding alleging conduct likely to pollute, impair, or destroy natural resources. The Inland Wetlands Commission accepted Roman's petition under §22a-19 in the first hour. Three hours later, after the public hearing was continued and the commission had recessed and reconvened as the Conservation Commission, the same body accepted the same petition again — this time under §7-131a, the conservation-commission analog.
Wednesday's hearing in the Town Hall Annex was the second installment of Noble Energy's continuing application. The first installment, in April, ended with the public hearing held open. The second installment ended the same way — continued again, this time to May 20 — but it ended with two things in the record that were not there three weeks ago: a formally accepted intervener petition, and a finding by the intervener's expert that a state-endangered wetland plant appears on the applicant's own plant inventory.
It also ended with both commissions attaching conditions to anything they eventually approve.
The Plan, Smaller Again
Most of the numbers had moved further in the same direction as last time. The warehouse, originally 28,000 square feet and reduced to 18,000 between hearings, stayed at 18,000. The travel center, originally 10,000 and reduced to about 8,400, also stayed reduced. The 4,500-square-foot restaurant the applicant had been carrying on the northeast corner — eliminated last round — remained eliminated. Total impervious surface dropped from above five acres to about four-and-a-half. Approximately 75 acres of the 86-acre site, the applicant's engineer told the commission, would be placed in a conservation easement. That is roughly 86 percent of the parcel, including the two on-site vernal pools and more than 50 acres of wetlands.
Taylor Capel, the licensed engineer at Solli Engineering of Monroe, walked through the revisions. "In doing so we've reduced the impervious area down to about four-and-a-half acres versus over five previously," he said. He also presented a set of physical deterrents intended to keep spotted salamanders from wandering up out of Vernal Pool 1 into the warehouse drive — an elevated curb behind the warehouse, the retaining wall, and what he called "Cape Cod curbing" along the Slater Road access drive: a shallower curb that small animals can cross.
Bill Kenny, who runs the Fairfield-based ecology and landscape-architecture firm William Kenny Associates and dialed in remote, presented an additional element — an expanded mitigation wetland on the north end of the property. The idea is to intercept road runoff coming off Fienemann Road before it crosses under the road and reaches Batterson Park Pond.
"This was something we developed when the wetland was going to be removed. It is not a required measure to take care of the stormwater management for the proposed project. This is really an additional thing. It is something that we think is really a good idea."
The original plan would have eliminated most of that roadside wetland. The redesign avoids that impact entirely. The expanded mitigation wetland would still be built — by choice, the applicant said, not by requirement.
The applicant team also walked the commission through Noble Energy's compliance framework — the procedural answer to Roman's argument that the engineered systems can't catch what they need to catch. Michael Frisbie, the owner of Noble Energy Real Estate Holdings and Noble Gas, Inc., described the Connecticut DEEP-required Class A, B, and C operator structure that governs every Noble station: a Class A operator responsible for broad regulatory compliance, Class B operators for daily release-detection and overfill-prevention monitoring, and Class C operators for first-line emergency response. Each of Noble's newer stations, Frisbie said, runs an automated leak-detection system on the underground tanks and lines, with monthly visual inspections, annual compliance testing, and a Connecticut DEEP compliance inspection every three years. "When they come in, they can see our records right away automated and it's audited," he said.
Counsel for the applicant, Robert J. Reeve of Scully, Nicksa & Reeve in Unionville, told the commission that staff had reviewed the revised plans and that "if the commission chooses to approve it, believes that the plans would not need further revision." That said, Reeve's remarks were limited. Roman's petition had landed about a week earlier. Her expert's report had landed Monday. The applicant team would respond to both at the May 20 continuation.
What Stephanie Roman's Petition Argues
Roman's petition argues that the project, even as redesigned, is reasonably likely to pollute, impair, or destroy natural resources. Her case rests on three claims.
The first is that the engineered stormwater systems in the plan — underground retention, hydrodynamic separators — cannot adequately treat dissolved pollutants from a diesel facility. "Studies show that TSS removal efficiencies could be only 30 to 50 percent and have also shown that dissolved pollutants would not be treated by these systems," Roman told the commission. No infiltration is planned on the site, she said. The plan, in her account, intends to use the wetlands themselves to do cleaning the engineering can't.
The second is the spill history at Noble's existing convenience-store location at 973 Farmington Avenue in New Britain. Roman cited a documented sequence of remediation actions in 2025 following a spill-bucket failure — a sequence Frisbie himself walked the commission through later in the meeting. By Frisbie's account, an August 12, 2025 DEEP compliance inspection identified damage to a spill bucket. The damaged bucket was replaced August 22. Noble's environmental contractor took groundwater samples September 30 and extracted "just over 2,000 gallons of water" using vacuum-extraction. Subsequent samples in December 2025 and March 2026, Frisbie said, came back clean.
Frisbie offered the sequence as evidence the system worked. Roman offered it as evidence the system needed to.
The third claim is structural. The plan's 100-foot buffer from the northernmost vernal pool and 20-foot setback from the southern wetland boundary are, in Roman's words, "woefully insufficient and do not meet the standards applied by this commission and other wetlands commissions in this state."
Reeve's rebuttal, when his turn came, was narrower. He took issue with Roman's framing of the project as "industrial" — Noble has applied to the Town Plan and Zoning Commission for a business-use change, he said, not an industrial designation. He took issue with the residential-area framing — Fienemann Road has commercial uses, he noted, "and I would submit to you that Interstate 84 is a commercial use as well." Then he made a procedural argument.
"She's an attorney. She's not a scientist. She's not an expert witness on matters of wetland science. … A lot of what she said I would classify as lay person speculation on matters that require an expert witness to rise to the level of substantial evidence."
Reeve's procedural argument was half-answered before he made it. Roman had her expert.
A State-Endangered Plant on the Applicant's Own List
The applicant's plant inventory of the on-site wetlands lists Saururus cernuus. Lizard's tail. A robust emergent wetland plant — heart-shaped leaves, long spiky flowers — more typical of the southern and midwestern United States than of New England. It is, in Connecticut, listed as endangered. On the state's Natural Diversity Data Base, finding it triggers a reporting requirement back to the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection: GPS coordinates, count, condition of the occurrence.
Roman's expert, Sigrun Gadwa, walked the commission through the find on Wednesday.
"The applicant's ecologists had good plant lists for both wetlands," Gadwa said. "And there were a lot of plants that were also in the small northern wetlands, which is one of the reasons that my report stated that, though they're small in extent, qualitatively they're very similar to the big wetlands."
Then she named the plant.
"The plant list included the endangered species, which is the lizard's tail."
Gadwa runs Carya Ecological Services out of 183 Guinevere Ridge in Cheshire. She holds a bachelor's in biology from Brown and a master's in ecology from UConn Storrs, and she is a registered Connecticut soil scientist and professional wetland scientist with about 30 years of field experience. Roman retained her as the intervener's expert. Her formal expert testimony will be admitted at the May 20 continuation; her finding, on Wednesday, came in during public comment.
The presence of Saururus cernuus also reframes the wetland-quality argument. The applicant's report has characterized the smaller wetlands on the site as low-functioning. Gadwa called them not degraded and not low-functioning — simply small, and qualitatively similar in plant composition to the larger wetlands on the parcel. A state-rare emergent species on the inventory cuts against the low-function framing.
Gadwa's other major point was about hydrology. The soils on the upland portion of the site, she said, sit on a densic horizon — a dense, hardpan layer 20 to 40 inches below the surface. That kind of subsoil does not let rainfall infiltrate to deep groundwater. It pushes water laterally, downslope, into the wetlands at the base of the hill.
"That's why when you have these densic horizons, when you have these hardpans, you always have nice wetlands at the base of the hill. A lot of the discharge is actually not visible. It's happening underground."
If the upland watershed gets converted to impervious surface — parking, warehouse, travel center — that lateral subsurface flow stops. The wetlands at the base of the hill, including Vernal Pool 1, lose the steady supply.
The applicant's ecologist, Jackson Smith of William Kenny Associates, had presented his own vernal-pool report earlier in the meeting. He documented two vernal pools on site — a shallow cryptic pool at the north end with more than 50 spotted salamander egg masses, and a more traditional depressional pool to the south, about 1,000 feet from the development envelope, with both wood frog tadpoles and salamander masses. By Smith's calculation, the project would not alter the 100-foot vernal-pool envelope of either pool. It would raise the developed share of Vernal Pool 1's broader critical terrestrial habitat from 33 percent to about 46 percent — under the 50-percent threshold for a Tier 1 high-functioning vernal pool, by his reading of the best-management-practice guidelines.
"We're going to place 75 acres of contiguous, unfragmented woodland into a conservation easement to protect these pools in the long term and prevent future encroachment."
That is the applicant's structural answer. Whether it satisfies the densic-horizon hydrology question Gadwa raised is the question Wednesday did not finish. The applicant team committed to a quantified watershed response before May 20.
What the Public Said
Public comment ran longer than the applicant's presentation. It also ran lopsidedly against the project.
Leslie Hammond, who lives on Linden Place in Hartford and helps organize Friends of Batterson Pond, was first. She introduced herself first as a realtor who had recently sold a house on Slater Road, then as someone who has been working on the Batterson Park reopening for about nine years.
"I almost want to cry when I think about this. … We have been at this for eight, nine years. … We desperately need that for the Farmington, New Britain, Hartford people."
Hammond credited Speaker Matt Ritter for the $10 million in state funding that has gone into the Batterson Park restoration under the umbrella of Riverfront Recapture, the Hartford-area nonprofit now managing the park's reopening. The pond, she said, is currently rated by DEEP for fishing but not swimming. Hammond does not want a runoff event from a Slater Road travel center to push that timeline back further.
Angela Presch lives at 12 Bonnie Drive in Farmington's Farmington Estates neighborhood, on the other side of I-84 from the parcel. She told the commission that her neighborhood has wetlands which connect, hydrologically, to the same system. She objected on water-quality grounds.
"Farmington doesn't have a lot of open space. We don't have a lot of wetlands, and it seems like a lot in this community has been built on wetlands in the last five years."
Denise Ortiz lives on Country Club Road in New Britain, up the street from Noble's existing 973 Farmington Avenue gas station. She said she had heard about the Wednesday hearing only 36 hours earlier. She objected on neighborhood-process grounds and on watershed grounds. There is a stormwater pipe that runs behind her house, she said, carrying water from up the hill. She does not want any of this project's runoff in her backyard.
Attorney Jeffrey P. Dressler of 84 Cedar Street in Hartford, dialing in for the second time in three weeks, expanded the school-corridor argument. At the April 15 hearing, he had named four schools within a half mile of the parcel. On Wednesday, by his count, the number was six — including DiLoreto Elementary & Middle on Slater Road, the Academy of Science and Innovation on Slater Road, E.C. Goodwin Technical High School on Slater Road, Gaffney Elementary on Slater Road, Chamberlain Elementary on Farmington Avenue, and Jefferson Elementary in New Britain. Dressler estimated about 3,500 students across those schools, 20 to 30 buses moving through the intersection on a school day, and bus traffic "every couple of minutes" during peak morning and afternoon windows.
"This is not an ordinary roadway intersection," he said.
Attorney Neil P. Connors lives on Batterson Drive in New Britain and works out of an office at 325 Main Street in Farmington. He sits on the Batterson Park Conservancy. He told the commission that Noble's existing station at 973 Farmington Avenue was attractive and well-run, that he respected the work — and then made an institutional argument.
"The proposal just approved by this commission for the trails and recreational area at Batterson Park itself is at seemingly cross purposes with this application."
The commission, in October 2024, reviewed the wetlands components of the Batterson Park restoration. Connors's argument was that the same body that has been approving a Hartford-owned park's reopening downstream should not, two years later, approve a discharge upstream that compromises it.
Online commenters Francesca Caruso of 6 Jeffrey Drive and Liz Bennett of 46 Mountain Road both asked the commission to deny the application. Bennett suggested Noble look at the former gas-station parcel at the corner of Fienemann Road and Route 6 — already polluted, already commercial, already disturbed — instead.
The only commenter in support was JR Cody of 7 Copper Beach Lane, a 20-year resident of the neighborhood. Cody told the commission that something would eventually be built on the parcel, that Noble's existing stations were clean and well-run, that an off-ramp parcel at the edge of town struck him as a reasonable fit, and that the project at least represented a different kind of development from the apartment buildings he said had become Farmington's recent default. He acknowledged he was alone in that view. "I know that's not what you've heard here tonight," he said.
The Conservation Commission's Pivot
The Inland Wetlands Commission adjourned just after 10 p.m. The Conservation Commission convened five minutes later, with most of the same members in the same seats. Roman's petition had been filed under both §22a-19 and §7-131a; the IWC had accepted it earlier in the night, and the Conservation Commission accepted it now.
What followed was an extended procedural debate about what the Conservation Commission's role at this stage actually was. Bruce Cyr explained that under §7-131a, the body's job was to make a recommendation back to the IWC — not to vote on the application itself, but to attach whatever conditions or framing the conservation members thought useful. Robert Eisner, who had not been present at the April 15 opening of the hearing, said he was comfortable finding that "the intervener's petition has merit and basis for further consideration in the record" but was not yet prepared to draft conditions. David Fox proposed taking on the easement-encroachment question Cyr had been flagging — visible on aerial imagery as cleared lawn and impervious surface extending from neighboring properties into the proposed easement boundary, including, in Smith's report, into Vernal Pool 2's hundred-foot envelope. Mark Simpson said the commission's responsibility was to look at the whole property, not just the seven-and-a-half-acre buildable footprint.
Eventually Eisner produced a motion the rest of the commission could second. Compressed: the petition is valid and has merit; the commission supports the proposed approximately 75-acre conservation easement, with the boundary refined to address the encroachments; the commission recommends best management practices be required as a condition of any approval; and the commission recommends increased vernal-pool protection to the extent possible and feasible.
The motion passed.
That referral now sits in front of the Inland Wetlands Commission as part of the May 20 record. The applicant team will respond to it, to Roman's petition, to Gadwa's report, and to a list of outstanding requests that grew through Wednesday — biofiltration alternatives for dissolved pollutants, an expanded snow-storage stormwater calculation, a quantified vernal-pool watershed response, a continuous salamander corridor between the truck-parking curb and the warehouse retaining wall, and the proposed roadside-runoff mitigation wetland on the north end.
The May 20 hearing now starts where Wednesday's left off: with an intervener at the table, a state-endangered plant in the record, and a Conservation Commission referral asking the same body to do more than it had been planning to do. The hearing was continued. The list got longer.
The Farmington Mercury's government coverage is brought to you by Farmington Storage — the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. Whatever you keep there is held under the same conditions the Smithsonian uses. Whether your tax records, your grandmother's china, or the zoning binders you were planning to read someday deserve that level of care is between you and history. 155 Scott Swamp Road, Farmington. 860.777.4001. farmingtonstorage.com.
— Jack Beckett has covered the Farmington Conservation and Inland Wetlands Commission long enough to know that "the geometry trap" is a real planning concept in Connecticut, even if the chair is the only one who calls it that. He is on his fourth cup of coffee. The hearing was three hours long. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers what Farmington's other outlets don't have time for — the wetlands hearing that ran past 10 p.m., the intervener petition that nobody else read, the procedural pivot that determines what the project actually has to do before it can be approved. We are slow on purpose. We are accurate on purpose. By the time you read this, the dust has settled, the names are spelled right, and someone at Carya Ecological Services in Cheshire has filed a lizard's-tail occurrence with DEEP. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com. #LastToFirst 📰