The backyard at 24 Summersby Way will not be getting a pool. It will be getting twelve inches of fill soil removed, a row of shrubs, some native perennials, a line of markers that used to be there and somehow were not, and a wetland scientist from Newtown who is now on the hook to come back three falls in a row and report his findings in writing.
That is how this particular story ends. It began, almost a year ago, with a pool.
The Paper Trail
In May 2025, a contractor named Lang Pools submitted an application on behalf of the homeowner at 24 Summersby Way for a backyard swimming pool. Town staff pulled the file and discovered the proposed pool was not the only thing encroaching into the conservation and wetland zones that wrap the rear of the property. The lawn was also encroaching. Quite a lot of the lawn. The pool application was withdrawn. The lawn was not so easily withdrawn. Commissioner Rich Berlandi, at the time, summed it up in six words: "This area needs to be restored."
On Wednesday, April 15, the Conservation and Inland Wetlands Commission approved the plan to do exactly that. (Noble Energy's smaller plan was the other wetland matter on the agenda.)
The Plan
Jim McManus, a certified professional soil scientist with JMM Wetland Consulting Services in Newtown, walked the Commission through the restoration plan he'd developed after visiting the site in June 2025. The numbers, when the room finally got to them, were quieter than they sound. Twelve inches of fill soil had been laid on top of the original wetland soils. The topsoil beneath it was still there. The old wetland boundary — the actual, surveyed boundary, not the lawn's version of it — had not moved. It just needed to be found again and marked.
McManus proposed removing the twelve inches, planting shrubs and small trees and a mix of native perennials, and leaving the mature arborvitae hedge along the property line in place. The hedge, he told the Commission, was dense, well-established, and doing more for the buffer than anything that might replace it. A landscape contractor could do the work. A wetland scientist would review it.
The Debate the Room Actually Had
The plan itself was not the hard part. The hard part was whether "restoration" meant putting the property back to what a wetland scientist would consider ecologically sound, or whether it needed to include a visible penalty — specifically, pulling the arborvitae hedge.
Commissioner Mark Simpson raised the concern. He said he understood the homeowner's position and had no reason to doubt the restoration would work. But he also said, and this is the sentence the commission had to sit with: "It seems to me… somebody just looked the other way because they had intention to do something. In this case, extend their yard."
Simpson referenced his own experience with an agricultural easement on a property he had once owned. He knew, firsthand, that conservation boundaries show up in the land records. He knew that a title search would have surfaced them. His worry was not with the ecology. It was with a future where a buyer takes possession of a piece of property, discovers the easement months later, and correctly concludes that the town's position is: fill the yard in, get caught, submit a plan, keep the hedge.
The homeowner, Ryan Ferguson, addressed this from the podium. He said the encroachment was not intentional, that he had inherited the situation with the property and had not known where the line was, and that he had cooperated with staff from the moment the violation surfaced. "I wouldn't have intentionally done it," he said. "It was a mistake. The markers are there, they need to be relocated back to where that actual line is. There's two that are missing."
Senior Assistant Town Planner Bruce Cyr, who has been walking this file for eleven months, offered the staff framing: clear the violation first, and any future permit conversation — including, one assumes, any future pool conversation — happens on a property that is no longer out of compliance.
What the Commission Actually Approved
The plan that passed included: removal of twelve inches of fill and restoration of the original wetland soils; a planting schedule of native shrubs, small trees, and perennials; the existing arborvitae hedge to remain; pine bark mulch as a temporary stabilizer; silt fence or straw wattles during earthwork if staff determine they're needed; conservation easement markers replaced and reinforced with either additional posts or a split rail fence with medallions, at the homeowner's discretion in consultation with staff; a wetland scientist to review all work; and — this is the part that makes it a closure piece rather than a checklist — a three-year monitoring period.
McManus will return to 24 Summersby Way in the fall of 2026, the fall of 2027, and the fall of 2028. Each visit generates a letter and a set of photographs submitted to the Commission. If plantings fail, they get replaced. If the buffer retreats, staff get a phone call.
The motion passed with one abstention.
Simpson did not vote against the plan. He did not, in the end, vote for it either. He let it pass on the merits while declining to put his name on the precedent — as honest a resolution as a civic body is likely to produce on a question that had no perfect answer. A plan that restores a wetland without punishing a homeowner who, whatever else one thinks, came to the podium and said out loud that the line needed to be moved back to where it belonged.
A year ago, this was a pool application. Now it is a three-year appointment with a soil scientist from Newtown. Town process, in the end, works the way it is supposed to work. It is just slower, and quieter, and harder to watch than most of us would like.
This coverage is brought to you by Farmington Storage at 155 Scott Swamp Road — museum-quality air circulation, family-owned, and reachable at 860.777.4001 or farmingtonstorage.com. If you have paperwork, photographs, or the records of a civic life you'd rather not stack in a basement, they have been keeping Farmington's archives dry since before most of the town's buffers were drawn.
— Jack Beckett
I'll be honest: when I pulled the May 2025 file on 24 Summersby Way, I assumed this was going to end in a knock-down fight about the arborvitae. It did not. The commission, to its credit, argued the right argument — whether a property gets restored is a technical question; whether the process rewards the right behavior is a civic one. Both got aired. Both got answered. Commissioner Simpson's abstention is the kind of quiet public conscience that almost never makes it into a headline, and it is exactly the kind of thing this paper was started to notice. Always last to breaking news. First, occasionally, to the part where the soil gets put back.