The wetland being put back at 114 West Avon Road does not stop at the property line. Part of it sits on the two lots next door.
That is why Farmington's Conservation and Inland Wetlands Commission tabled the restoration plan on July 8. It wanted letters of approval from both abutting owners before it signed off.
Two weeks later it had one of the two. On July 22 the commission approved the plan anyway, and did not say on the record what the missing letter is worth.
The neighbor who never wrote back
The owner of the larger abutting parcel supports the application and put it in writing.
The other property has been unoccupied for a year or more while it is renovated, and its owner lives in another town. Everything the commission knows about the effort to reach that owner came from the applicant's own agent, the landscape architect Robert "Biff" Schechinger: letters went to the house and to the out-of-town address, beginning when the application was first submitted roughly two months earlier, and nothing came back either way. No record of that outreach was submitted, and the commission did not ask for one. The Mercury has not independently reached the owner.
Chair Ned Statchen did press on the paperwork, asking whether the town had a record of the one approval that did arrive.
David Fox, the commission's secretary, who had missed the July 8 meeting and told colleagues he had streamed it, asked the harder question: was it a problem that one of the landowners had not approved the plan when work was going to happen on their property?
"Technically, it could be," Bruce Cyr, the town's conservation and wetlands agent, said. "But I think at that point, it's a private matter."
Whether that is right is the one thing the record does not settle. Nobody at the meeting said aloud what the commission's approval means for the two lots the work reaches, or whether an owner who never answered can still object once planting starts. Staff will keep trying in the meantime. Cyr offered to go through town files for a phone number and noted there is time before anything goes in the ground.
The letters were not the only thing the commission had asked for on July 8. It also wanted the owner to come back with a firm cost estimate. That did not come up on the record before the vote either.
What is being put back
The case began, as The Farmington Mercury reported on July 10, with a low spot in a backyard. Brianna Brochu bought the house in 2025, her first, and was told the grassy bowl behind it came with it. She set out to clean up an area the previous owners had run as a track for all-terrain vehicles, and started excavating a low place that collected water. What she hit was sand.
What she had was a wetland. The town issued a cease-and-desist order on September 23, 2025. Cyr told commissioners that staff classified the area as a wetland, and issued the order, because of the amount, depth, and duration of the water that collects there.
The restoration covers roughly 8,000 square feet and 575 plants, staged by elevation across wet basin, wet meadow, and upland areas so the planting can survive a site that swings between saturated and dry. At the July 8 hearing there was a foot to a foot and a half of standing water in it. About seven cubic yards of excavated and stockpiled material comes off the site. The work is scheduled for this fall.
It is an unusual place to plant a wetland. The soils are excessively drained, over porous sand, and a seasonal high groundwater table floods the area at times. "It's an issue of very highly porous sand with a fluctuating groundwater system," Schechinger told the commission. It is close to the opposite, he said, of the dense, high-organic soil a wetland planting normally assumes.
Brochu sat through the hearing without speaking. Her architect handled the presentation, as he had on July 8.
Three conditions, written from the floor
The commission wrote all three conditions during the meeting itself.
Robert C. Isner, the commission's vice chair, opened by asking Cyr how long, in a restoration like this one, the commission usually expects the plants to be maintained.
"That's a good point," Cyr said. "We could do a three-year review is how we usually do it." Year one confirms the planting went in. Years two and three confirm it is still there.
Statchen folded that into the motion as a stipulation. Isner then made the motion with two conditions of his own. The first requires the owner to keep coordinating with town staff on erosion and sedimentation control, and on arrangements with the neighbors. The second allows up to one-third of the plants installed to be lost to ordinary mortality without triggering a mandatory replacement.
"The reason for the last condition is that it was a robust restoration plan," Isner said. "So I think flexibility in the installation and maintenance is perfect."
Schechinger said some of the plants are effectively double-loaded, seeded as well as planted, so one that dies may still come up from the seed a couple of years on.
The motion passed on a voice vote.
That is the tension in the night's work. The same board that wrote three conditions from the floor, one of them precise enough to anticipate how many plants might die, approved the plan without the letters it had asked for two weeks earlier.
What happens next
Not much, for a while. The commission does not meet in August. Statchen closed the evening by suggesting they take the summer off, and the next meeting falls in September.
The West Avon Road plan was one of four applications the commission cleared that night before the recess, along with a shed at 57 Cope Farms Road, a septic system for an accessory dwelling unit at 222 Talcott Notch Road, and an in-ground pool at 24 Somersby Way, the property where the commission approved a separate three-year easement restoration in April. It is the ordinary work of a board that spends most of its time asking where the water goes.
By the terms the commission laid out on July 8, the cease-and-desist order stays in place until the restoration plan is approved, and lifts at that point. The commission did not take that up on the record on July 22, and the town's pending-application list still carries 114 West Avon Road as a continued cease-and-desist matter.
Planting starts this fall. The reports run for three years after that. The one party who has not been heard from is the neighbor whose land some of it will sit on.
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road, the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. Three years of annual reports is one way to prove a thing was kept the way it was supposed to be kept. Climate control is the other. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett has covered Farmington's wetlands commission long enough to know that the interesting part of a land-use file is usually the condition nobody enforced. He has read the minutes, the plan revisions, and the planting list. He is on his second coffee. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the wetlands hearing that turns on a letter nobody sent, the police log that is technically public record but that you would never find unless someone typed it up, the budget vote that decides what your taxes do next year. We publish slowly, deliberately, and without apology. Our motto is "Always last to breaking news" and we stand behind it. By the time you read this, the dust has settled and the facts are checked. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰