FARMINGTON — "People are not going to live in homes that they can't heat."
A commissioner said that out loud at the Unionville Historic District and Properties Commission on September 3, and nobody in the room disagreed. That is roughly the whole problem with running a historic district in a state with Connecticut winters, and the commission spent a good part of the evening walking around it.
There were no permit applications on the agenda that night. What Chair Lisa Johnson put in front of the members instead was a state training video, and the argument it started was about windows.
What this commission can actually do
Unionville is the village at Farmington's western end, and it has its own local historic district. Under state law the commission that governs it holds a real lever: no building or demolition permit may be issued for a property inside the district until the commission has issued a certificate of appropriateness. Nothing may be erected or altered there without one.
The limits are just as specific. The commission may not consider the inside of your house at all. It has no say over the color you paint the outside. And ordinary maintenance or repair that does not change how a feature looks is exempt, which is why, as Johnson described the commission's practice, swapping asphalt shingles for asphalt shingles never reaches them.
Windows, though, are exterior architectural features, and they are the commission's business.
What the state told commissioners
The video is a Local Historic District Commissioner Training recorded on December 20, 2023, presented by the Connecticut State Historic Preservation Office and the nonprofit Preservation Connecticut, and hosted by the Norwich Historic District Commission. It runs an hour and twenty-two minutes. As of this week it had been viewed 49 times.
The windows section is presented by Mary Dunne, the preservation office's grants coordinator and the person a town calls to book this training in the first place. Her position is not subtle.
The number one reason people give her office for wanting to replace old windows, she says, is a new owner assuming the originals are drafty. "And maybe they're not energy efficient because they haven't been maintained. They're missing window panes, or they haven't been painted or caulked or weather stripped. But those very easy maintenance procedures can go a long, long way to making that original window just as, if not more, energy efficient than the replacement."
Then: "You don't even lose most of your heat through the windows or your energy, so that's not really a very good argument either."
And later: "Unless you're missing the window entirely, I have never found really compelling reasons for replacing original windows."
In the question-and-answer half, Dunne named the number that would come back nearly three years later in Unionville. Describing what a commissioner runs into after telling a homeowner no, she said: "Prove to me that only 10 percent of the heat is lost through my windows."
She did not offer the 10 percent as settled. She raised it as the figure owners demand proof of, and said the state would go get the proof. "We do have studies and stuff like that," she said. "So one thing we'll do is share that with you. We'll gather it and post it and get it to you."
The argument
Commissioner Ann O'Malley Kerr reached that part and stopped.
"Lisa, I watched it today, and it was interesting because her information was off," she told the chair. "You do not lose 10 percent of your energy through bad windows. You lose up to 30 percent of your energy through bad windows."
Johnson agreed the segment was confusing. On the broader claim she was blunt: "That is not what I understood to be the case."
O'Malley Kerr ran the same argument up to the roofline. A tree comes down on a slate roof, she said, you need the commission's approval, and in the meantime you can throw a tarp over it, and "people can't replace a slate roof these days. The cost is enormous."
The town's recording carries no speaker labels, so not every voice in the discussion can be identified. The heating-bills line is one of them.
What the state has actually published
The studies Dunne offered to gather were already on her own office's website when she offered to gather them.
The preservation office keeps a page called Historic Preservation and Energy Efficiency, with a section on windows. Under a heading that reads Research, it poses the Unionville argument almost word for word: "Are replacement windows more energy efficient than historic windows? Is it more cost-effective in the long run to replace historic windows?" Below it sit four studies, among them Saving Windows, Saving Money and Measured Winter Performance of Storm Windows. The Internet Archive captured that page, studies and all, in June 2023, six months before the training was recorded.
The office has also published a homeowner's guide with the Connecticut Green Bank, nearly ninety pages, whose own text says it is current as of March 2020. Its air-sealing chapter is where the state's numbers live. Air leakage "can account for anywhere from 5 to 40 percent of heating and cooling costs." As much as 30 percent of the energy a home's heating and cooling equipment uses "is escaping through air leaks." And "just by caulking and weather stripping alone, it is possible to save 10 percent on energy bills."
What the guide tells a cold homeowner to do, before it says anything about glass, is to find the leaks and look at the attic, the basement and the roof. Dunne says the same on the recording, and then tells a story about a machine shop she worked in that had windows at least six feet high. They restored the windows. They also put a new insulated roof on the building. "You would not believe how much more comfortable it was," she says, "with just a new roof."
One thing worth knowing about the guide: its window chapter does not speak in the state's voice. It reprints, lightly edited, a top ten list from the New England Window Restoration Alliance, a trade organization whose members restore windows for a living. That list is the source of the guide's most quotable window claim, that a homeowner can save 30 to 40 percent on heating costs without replacing anything. The state published it. The state did not produce it.
Farmington answered this in 2022
By the end of the discussion the commission had decided to do nothing, because it turned out it had already decided.
Someone pulled up the district's design guidelines and read the window language into the record. Window colors matched to the remaining windows as closely as possible. Preference given to interior storm windows, which is a second pane fitted on the inside of the original so the old window still faces the street. As one commissioner described the good ones: "You can't even really tell they're there." Where an interior storm is not feasible, the guidelines allow "a metal window that covers the entire window opening."
The guidelines were adopted in 2016 and amended on June 2, 2022. One commissioner remembered that amendment as the one that added electric vehicle chargers. Told it had also rewritten the language on windows, the reply was: "I don't remember that now."
"So I don't see a reason for us to review that," Johnson said. "I think that conversation just got a little bit too involved in details."
The guidelines are the job, she told the members. "They're not really a contract with our property owners, but they let our property owners know as specifically as possible what we expect when their house is in the district."
Then a commissioner said the thing the whole evening had been circling.
"I think we've always, since I've been on the commission, always operated we want the homes to be lived in. We want them to be living history. So we have to make it possible for people to live in." 🏛️
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road, the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air, which is their way of saying the temperature and humidity are held at museum conditions. Old things last longer when somebody controls the climate around them. Preservationists have held this view for some time. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett covers Farmington and has now watched an hour and twenty-two minutes of state historic district commissioner training so you do not have to. He is on his fourth coffee and his own windows rattle. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the commission meeting with two votes on the agenda and a real argument in the middle of it, the design guidelines nobody reads until somebody reads them aloud, the state research that was sitting there the whole time. We publish slowly and without apology. Our motto is "Always last to breaking news" and we mean it, because by the time you read this somebody has opened the studies. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰