For years, Farmington's Town Plan and Zoning Commission has decided, application by application, where housing goes and how dense it gets. A new Connecticut law has taken a piece of that decision away, and on Monday, June 22, the town's own planners walked the commission through exactly how much.
The occasion was a first reading, not a vote. Assistant Town Planner Garrett Daigle and Town Planner Shannon Rutherford introduced three draft zoning amendments at the June 22 meeting. Two were housekeeping by comparison: a cleanup of the sign regulations and a standalone rule for ground-mounted solar. The third rewrites how apartments get approved in Farmington, and the town did not choose to write it.
It is required by Connecticut Public Act 25-1, "An Act Concerning Housing Growth," better known by its bill number, House Bill 8002. The law has a complicated parentage. Its predecessor, House Bill 5002, was vetoed by Governor Ned Lamont in 2025. HB 8002 is the scaled-back renegotiation the legislature passed in a November special session and the governor signed just before Thanksgiving, with some pieces effective immediately. Every Connecticut town now has to bring its zoning into compliance. By Daigle's account, figuring out what that meant for Farmington took months. The summary of the changes alone runs three pages. The full zoning regulation it edits runs 233.
What the law actually does
The core of it: Farmington must now allow "transit community" middle housing of two to nine units, by summary site-plan review, in zones set aside for commercial and mixed-use development. (Because Farmington's industrial zone borrows the list of uses permitted in its business zones, the planners are folding the industrial zone in too.) "Summary review" is the whole story. It means no public hearing. It means no special permit, no variance, no discretionary "we will consider it" vote. If a project conforms to the regulation, the commission approves it.
"It has to be through site plan review only," Daigle told the commission. "And you can only deny it if it's not in conformance with regulations and that public health and safety would be substantially impacted."
That is a different commission than the one Farmington is used to. The same body that holds hours of testimony on a single house, that just spent three meetings on a truck stop, loses its hearing entirely for a duplex, a triplex, a "perfect six" (three floors, two units each, in the planners' description), or a cottage cluster on a commercial lot. The law also strips Farmington of the power to require minimum parking on smaller residential projects. Daigle told the commission it goes further still, capping what the town can require even on larger developments at one space for a studio or one-bedroom and two for anything bigger. Farmington's current regulation asks for one and a half spaces on a one-bedroom. That number is going away.
If it sounds like a tangle of different thresholds, it is. "It's all over the place. It's confusing," Daigle said of the act. "It's taken months to figure out exactly what we had to do."
Where it can actually happen
The mandate reaches only Farmington's non-residential zones, and there are not many of them. Daigle read the shares into the record: the industrial-restricted zone covers 4.62 percent of the town, professional office 1.74 percent, business restricted 1.68 percent, the B1 zone 0.58 percent, the Unionville Center zone 0.34 percent, and the Farmington Center zone 0.09 percent. The standard residential zones, the R9 through R80 lots where most of Farmington lives, are untouched. Nothing changes for a single-family neighborhood.
And the buildable footprint inside those commercial and industrial zones is smaller than the percentages suggest. A large share of the industrial land north of Route 6 and west of New Britain Avenue is state-owned open space, which cannot be developed at all. The law opens a door; the geography of Farmington keeps most of the rooms behind it locked.
What the town can still control
Because the commission can no longer say no through a hearing, the planners are trying to write down, in advance, everything they would otherwise argue out in one. The housing rules will live in a new Section 31 of the zoning regulation, which repeals a medical-marijuana moratorium that expired in 2015 and has been sitting in the code, unused, for eleven years.
Inside that section, the draft caps density at eight units per net acre, sets roof, height, and exterior-material standards, requires downcast "dark sky" lighting capped at 3,000 Kelvin, and mandates landscaped buffers between new housing and neighboring uses. A mixed-use building has to put commercial space on at least 60 percent of its ground floor, so a developer cannot tuck one token storefront under apartments and call it mixed use. The architectural standards have gone to the Architectural Design Review Committee for input. The same rewrite also strikes Farmington's minimum-floor-area requirement, to comply with a separate 2021 state law, Public Act 21-29.
None of this is a way around the state mandate. It is the town setting the terms of an approval it can no longer refuse.
What happens next
June 22 was an introduction, the kind Rutherford compared, gamely, to speed dating: a lot of complicated material, very little time, and a promise to talk again. The commission takes no action on a first reading. The sign and solar amendments are likely to share one September public hearing; the housing rewrite will get its own. The full text and the three-page summary are posted on the town's website.
Running underneath all of it is the town's next ten-year Plan of Conservation and Development, the long-range document Farmington is about to start rewriting, with public surveys and design workshops expected through the fall. The state has already decided what Farmington must permit. The Plan of Conservation and Development is where the town gets to say what it wants instead. The timing is not lost on anyone who sat through June 22.
There is a certain irony in the calendar. Two weeks earlier, on June 8, this same commission denied a Lake Garda couple a permit for a single one-story house it judged too big for the neighborhood, only for the town planner to note the couple could build a slightly smaller version by right anyway. Farmington spends real energy deciding the character of one house at a time. Hartford has just told it that, for a whole class of housing, character is no longer the commission's call. The same tension sits a few agenda items over, where the Enclave subdivision heads toward its own July 13 zoning decision.
The hearing is in September. There will not, by law, be much of a hearing.
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road, the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. Zoning rewrites come and go; some things you just want kept at institutional grade until the rules settle. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett has covered Farmington's Plan and Zoning Commission long enough to know the difference between a special permit and a summary review, and to understand that the difference is the whole job. He is on his second coffee. The regulation is 233 pages. He read the three-page summary first, like a reasonable person. ☕
*The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the zoning rewrite that arrives from Hartford with no hearing attached, 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, because by the time you read this the dust has settled, the facts are checked, and Jack Beckett has had at least two cups of coffee. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰