Eight Consultants Want to Write Farmington's Next 10-Year Plan. The Town Picks Four This Friday.
Eight planning firms have submitted proposals to write Farmington's next Plan of Conservation and Development — the document that, in a quieter and more thorough way than any zoning fight or fire-station debate, will define what kind of town Farmington intends to be for the next decade. The proposals came in on May 1. The shortlist meeting, where the eight will be narrowed to four for interviews, is Friday, May 29. Town Planner Shannon Rutherford reported the count to the Town Plan and Zoning Commission at its regular meeting on May 27, under her planner's report.
The town does not have a writer yet. As of this week, it has bidders.
What a POCD actually is
Most Farmington residents have never read the town's Plan of Conservation and Development. They will, nevertheless, live inside it for a decade. The POCD is not zoning law and it is not a budget. It is the structural blueprint underneath both: where the town expects growth to go, where it intends to protect open space, what kinds of development it wants to see along which corridors, what its conservation priorities are, what its housing mix should look like, where its commercial centers belong, what its transportation aspirations are.
The TPZ writes it. The town's own description of the commission's responsibility names the POCD directly: "The Commission further provides recommendations for future land use throughout the Town through the Plan of Conservation and Development." In plainer terms — the POCD is the long view the commission commits to before sitting down to vote on any specific project. Years from now, when a developer's application reaches the commission, the POCD is what the commission will reach for to decide whether the application fits the town's stated future or pushes against it.
How Farmington got here
Farmington's current POCD was adopted in 2007 and amended in 2016. A separate 2018 addendum sits alongside it. Both documents are posted on the town's TPZ page, and both will continue to govern day-to-day land-use decisions until the next plan replaces them.
The arithmetic is not subtle. The substantive framework dates to 2007. Its most recent amendment is now a decade old. The Farmington that those documents addressed — its housing pressures, its commercial real estate, its watershed mapping, its transit and traffic patterns, the regional context around it — has moved. A new plan is overdue not because the old plan was wrong, but because the cycle is what it is. Farmington is at the ten-year mark.
Eight bids on the table, four interviews next
Here is what is on the record.
Eight planning firms responded to the town's Request for Proposals by the May 1 deadline. Staff is meeting on Friday, May 29 to narrow the field to four. The four finalists will be interviewed. A consultant will then be selected and contracted.
What is not on the record: the names of the eight firms, the cost ranges in their proposals, which of them have written POCDs for other Connecticut towns, and which four will make Friday's cut. None of those details were discussed at Wednesday's meeting and the Mercury does not have them. The town will, presumably, announce the four finalists after Friday's shortlist meeting. The Mercury will get to that announcement on its own schedule.
It is worth being honest about timing. The process slipped roughly three to four weeks because Rutherford was unexpectedly out earlier this spring. The eight respondents have been notified of the delay — Rutherford sent that email the Friday before Memorial Day weekend — and the process is back on its compressed cycle. None of which is the kind of news that travels. It is, however, the kind of small-staff reality that determines when planning work like this actually happens.
What the next twelve months look like
The TPZ's normal docket continues: the Reservation Road staircase the commission approved 6-1 earlier this month, the Noble Energy rezoning hearing scheduled for July 27, the FEMA flood-map adoption with its own fall 2026 deadline. Underneath all of it, the POCD update will move forward on what Rutherford described as roughly a monthly rhythm. Some check-ins may be Zoom calls of thirty minutes to an hour. Some will be longer working sessions. The intent, by her read of the commission's calendar, is steady contact rather than a dramatic single hearing — planning of this scope tends to get written this way when it gets written carefully.
If you live in Farmington and you have an opinion about where the next decade of growth ought to go, or which parts of town deserve more protection, or what the housing mix here should look like, the POCD is where that opinion belongs. We will be here for the twists that matter.
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This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road — the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. A POCD is, in its own way, a storage problem: a town decides which version of itself to preserve and which boxes get labeled "for later." Farmington Storage does roughly the same thing for residents at institutional-grade humidity. The questions are similar. The climate control is identical. 860.777.4001 📦
— Jack Beckett has read every Connecticut Plan of Conservation and Development that Farmington's planning office has put on its website. He found the 2018 addendum more interesting than expected. He is on his second cup of coffee. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers the meetings nobody else is covering — the planning hearing that gets to the substance, the zoning amendment that quietly affects your insurance premium, the procurement that determines who writes the document that determines how the town will look in ten years. We publish slowly, deliberately, and with our sources cited. Our motto is "Always last to breaking news," and we mean it: by the time we get to your inbox, the facts have been checked, the dust has settled, and Jack Beckett has had at least two cups of coffee. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com. Tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰