FARMINGTON — For years, the house-turned-office at 1422 Farmington Avenue has sat mostly empty. Jeff Bernetich ran an Allstate office there starting in 2014, moved it to East Windsor, found a tenant, then lost the tenant to the pandemic. On Sept. 14, Farmington's Town Plan and Zoning Commission let him turn the building into a two-family home, with no public hearing, under a state housing law the town had not yet written into its own rules.
Later that night, it wrote them in. Staff had said they did not expect a vote. The commission took one anyway, near the end of a four-hour meeting, after the town planner said no member of the public remained in the room or online.
The law, Public Act 25-1, passed in a legislative special session last November, requires every Connecticut town to allow small housing developments of two to nine units, and buildings that mix apartments with shops or offices, on land zoned for commercial or mixed use. Those projects now need only the commission's sign-off on a site plan. There is no public hearing, and the commission can say no only if the plan breaks the town's regulations or would substantially affect public health and safety.
What it means on the ground is modest. The new rule does not reach Farmington's residential neighborhoods. The law let the town open them to these projects too, and the town declined. Staff expect "one or two a year" of these applications, most of them on small commercial lots that have been hard to fill.
"Realistically, we really can't change anything anyway," Commissioner Robert Canto said before the vote, "because it's coming out of the state statute."
That was mostly true. The state wrote the core of it. But the law left Farmington a few real choices, and the town made them: it kept residential zones out, it counted its industrial zones in on the town attorney's advice, and it wrote its own standards on density, design and mixed use. Town Planner Shannon Rutherford pointed Canto to those standards as the exception. She relayed the advice staff had received from the town attorney about writing them: "None of this has been tested, so go ahead, do your best. You know, don't be outlandish with it."
The first one
Bernetich told the commission the building had been "sitting primarily empty for years," and that he had "spent thousands trying to get it rented out."
Commissioner Philip Cordeiro asked whether it was "sort of the first thing we've seen" under the new law. Rutherford said the application was arriving ahead of the town's own rules, relying on the state statute directly, which allows two to nine units on a business-zoned lot "basically as of right." The property stays zoned for business.
"I think this is frankly a perfect use of the new law," Commissioner Josh Davidson said. The motion carried.
Rutherford said there are others like it, on West Avon Road and lower Main Street. "It's going to be these small pockets that they've historically had trouble with," she said.
The neighborhoods stay out
Opening residential zones was optional. Assistant Town Planner Garrett Daigle told the commission it would earn the town a quarter of a "housing equivalency point," a credit that counts toward qualifying for a four-year moratorium under the state's affordable-housing rules. During a moratorium, the state's affordable-housing appeals procedure, the process a developer can use to challenge a town's denial of an affordable-housing application in court, does not apply to applications filed with the town. Staff had done the math, he said, and Farmington already has enough points "if we needed to."
"We don't really see a benefit in permitting two to nine units on any lot zoned residential at this time," he said.
By the zone-by-zone figures Daigle presented, that leaves the law covering about a tenth of Farmington's land: roughly 4.4 percent in office, business and village-center zones and 6.4 percent in industrial zones. Those totals include open space that cannot be built on. The industrial zones are included on the town attorney's advice, Daigle said, because they already allow everything the business zones allow.
What the town still controls
The standards Farmington wrote for itself become part of the regulations every site plan must meet, which is where the town keeps some say. Outside Unionville Center and Farmington Center, which set density under their own rules, they cap density at eight units per acre of usable land, send every design to the town's Architectural Design Review Committee for advice, and limit exteriors to materials such as brick, stone, lap siding and shingles.
For mixed-use buildings, commercial space must fill at least 60 percent of the first floor. Rutherford said the rules are meant in part to stop a bait and switch, in which a building is approved with a quiet tenant like a doctor's office and later brings in something far busier. Her example was a nightclub. Any change to an approved commercial use comes back to the commission.
On parking, the state set the terms. For developments of 16 units or fewer, the commission cannot deny an application for falling short of a parking requirement, Daigle said.
A vote nobody planned
The housing amendment was the last hearing of the night. Daigle opened it by telling the commission, "I am not expecting you to vote on this regulation tonight because there's a lot to go through."
It did not work out that way. When he finished, a commissioner joked that he had a future in filibusters. "It helps when the state does most of the writing for you," Daigle said. One commissioner called the changes straightforward. The town had received no written comment, and Rutherford said no member of the public remained in the room or online. Davidson said he was ready to vote, and Chair Liz Sanford declared the motion carried. The official minutes, which will record the count, had not been posted as of Friday, Sept. 18, and no effective date was given at the meeting.
The commission first heard these changes in June, when the planners walked it through the state law. It meets again Sept. 28 and Oct. 5. The town's resident survey for its next 10-year land-use plan, the Plan of Conservation and Development, is expected to open around Oct. 5.
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road, the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. Hartford can change the rules in a special session. Some things are better kept exactly as they are, at institutional grade. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett has covered Farmington's Town Plan and Zoning Commission long enough to know the last hearing of the night is never the short one. He is on his third coffee. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the zoning amendment adopted at the end of a four-hour Monday agenda, the police log that is technically public record but that you would never find on your own, the school-budget vote that decides what your kids learn next year. 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 📰