FARMINGTON — Before the pool went up at 12 Lake Garda Drive, its owner, Brant Pranulis, checked with Farmington's planning office. The town's map had the property line in the wrong place.
On Sept. 21, the town's Zoning Board of Appeals voted 6-0 to let the pool stay, 11 feet closer to the rear property line than the zoning rules allow. "This isn't the homeowner or the builder, this is the town," said Commissioner Elizabeth Gemski, who made the motion.
How it got there
Pranulis told the board the question at the counter was about the side fence: how far did a pool have to be from it? The owner set the pool at that distance, beside the house, in Unionville's Lake Garda neighborhood. Had the 25-foot rear setback come up, "I wouldn't have gone through all the trouble," Pranulis said. The pool itself was free, the owner said, but leveling the ground and filling it cost a few thousand dollars.
Assistant Town Planner Garrett Daigle laid out the town's side of it. The first permit on file was for a different pool, an 18-foot round one, in a different spot. Staff signed off on it "not realizing that the property line was shown incorrectly" on the town's digital property map, Daigle said. Asked whether that first pool, in that first spot, would have needed a variance too, Daigle said yes.
The owner then switched to a larger oval pool and moved it. In Farmington, building and zoning sign off on the same permit. What happened next, Daigle told the board, was this:
"So there was a miss where the building official reviewed the permit. I chatted with [Pranulis] at the counter, but I never received it. The step was not reactivated for me to sign off on it. And therefore, we never signed off on the location. Based on the previous mapping, we figured it would be close enough."
The side was fine. The back was not.
A neighbor's email complaint brought the town planner and the building official out to measure, with the pool already up. The complaint said the pool was too close to the side property line. On that, the town found, it was wrong: the side setback in the zone is 10 percent of the lot's frontage, up to 10 feet, which works out to 7.8 feet here, and the pool meets it.
The back was another matter. Working from surveys of the neighboring properties, and from the only survey of this lot staff could find, dated 1949 and revised in 1951, staff concluded that the town's map had the rear property line in the wrong place. The rear fence, a staff memo says, sits about four and a half feet inside the actual line. Measured from that line, the back of the pool is 14 feet away. The rules require 25.
Could it go anywhere else?
According to the staff memo, the lot is about 9,150 square feet, the house was built in 1950, and its back wall sits about 40 feet from the rear property line. The 25-foot setback leaves 15 feet. The pool is 16 feet wide, and the building code requires three feet of clear space around it, so that no one can climb into the pool from something beside it.
Asked whether any standard above-ground pool would fit, Daigle said: "I would argue not without a variance."
What counts as a hardship
Chair Jon L. Schoenhorn told Pranulis at the start that a hardship has to come from the land, not the owner's circumstances. "If we give a variance, it's not just for if you move tomorrow," Schoenhorn said. "It applies to whoever you sell the property to."
Before the vote, Schoenhorn, an attorney, set out two legal ideas pulling against each other. One is detrimental reliance: a person who relies on an official's statement and loses by it may be able to raise that as a kind of hardship. The other is Morikawa v. Zoning Board of Appeals of Weston, a case in which a trial court ruled that a mistake by the homeowners' own architect or contractor was a self-created hardship that could not support a variance. The Connecticut Appellate Court upheld that judgment in 2011. Commissioner Kerry Callahan, also an attorney, said Schoenhorn had not misstated either idea.
Gemski drew the line between them. Morikawa, as the chair described it, was about a mistake by the homeowner or the builder. This one was the town's, Gemski said: "I feel like the town misspoke in a couple of areas and maybe kind of got ahead of their skis a little bit."
No one at the hearing spoke against the pool. A neighbor, Maureen Dressler, wrote in support and spoke at the hearing. The neighbor who filed the complaint did not attend or send comments, Daigle said.
The vote
Commissioner Cate Grady-Benson seconded and suggested evergreen plantings along the side fence, with an eye to the neighbors. Pranulis agreed. "I planned on cleaning the yard anyway," the owner said. The final motion requires an evergreen buffer along the side property line, to be reviewed by town staff. Of the plantings, Callahan said: "I've got nothing against them, but I don't know that they're necessary."
On a roll call, Gemski, Grady-Benson, Commissioner Steven P. Walsh, Callahan, Secretary Christopher R. Cloud and Schoenhorn all voted yes.
It was the board's first meeting since February. Later the same night, it asked the town's Plan and Zoning Commission to wait on its new solar rules.
The question from next door
Dressler asked the question most homeowners would: how do the building permit and the zoning review talk to each other?
Schoenhorn said that was not usually the board's business, but that approval of a structure does not mean it can go anywhere; it still has to meet zoning. Daigle's answer was that when a permit changes, "they'd have to reactivate the zoning step." This time, nobody did.
The pool stays. The survey staff relied on was last revised in 1951.
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Jack Beckett has covered enough Farmington variance hearings to know to look for the survey first. He is on his third coffee. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the variance hearing, the permit step nobody reactivated, the 1949 survey in the file. We publish slowly, deliberately, and without apology. Our motto is "Always last to breaking news," and we mean it. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰