Where Does the Water Go? One Night at the Farmington Wetlands Commission
The Farmington Inland Wetlands Commission asked a man about his 500-square-foot patio and a company about its 86-acre fueling-and-warehouse complex on Wednesday night, and it asked them, more or less, the same question. Where does the water go?
That is most of the job. Strip away the engineering slides, the statutes, and the hours of testimony, and a wetlands commission exists to make people account for runoff before it becomes someone else's problem downstream. Wednesday's agenda ran from a backyard on a lake to an industrial fueling site on the New Britain line, and at every stop — patio, driveway, warehouse roof, parking lot — the commission wanted the same thing: a credible answer to where the water ends up. By the time it adjourned, it had handed down two approvals and two continuances. Some applicants had their answer ready. One asked for two more weeks to finish drawing it.
The easy one
It started, as these meetings mercifully do, with something small. The owner of 109 Waterside Lane came back to finish what he'd started — a roughly 500-square-foot patio addition on a lot whose house sits in West Hartford and whose backyard is entirely in Farmington, up against Woodridge Lake. The water question here had a tidy answer: a rain garden sized at just over a quarter of the patio's footprint, built to University of Connecticut specifications, with the grade running back toward the house and away from the lake. No trees removed. Hay bales during construction.
Chair Ned Statchen asked if any erosion control was needed. It was the same question he would put, in far more elaborate form, to a company proposing diesel pumps later that night. Here it took barely a few minutes to answer. The commission found the application insignificant, required no sidewalk, and approved it on the condition that the rain-garden plans reach the town before anyone starts digging. Everyone said thank you. The applicant was wished good luck.
The one that came back from the dead
It did not, but the second item at least had a tidy moral. The 9 Apple Tree Lane application — a post-fire house rebuild — carries with it an awkward inheritance: a wetland restoration the commission approved years ago, planted, and then watched die. The combination of a post-fire water shutoff and last summer's drought killed the stock. The buffer that was supposed to protect the wetland is, at the moment, not protecting anything.
So the commission did what wetlands commissions do, which is attach conditions until the thing can't fail quietly. The owner reported that his landscape architect recommended planting in late September; staff cautioned that some wetland stock has to be ordered in the spring and may not be available in the fall, and asked for written confirmation that the whole job can actually be done in one season. The approval, when it came, arrived wrapped in stipulations: a planting plan, a purchase order with a delivery guarantee, a schedule, the original 2022 conditions folded back in, three years of monitoring, and a driveway regraded to drain toward the road instead of the wetland beside it. Staff noted the certificate of occupancy can be held until the plantings prove they intend to live this time. The water, in this case, was made to run down the driveway toward the road — and that, more or less, was the entire negotiation.
The main event
Then came the reason most of the room was there. Noble Energy Real Estate Holdings wants to build on roughly 86 acres at 8261 Fienemann Road, where Slater Road meets the Interstate 84 ramps — an 18,000-square-foot warehouse and an 8,400-square-foot travel center with a diesel fueling station, upstream of two vernal pools and, beyond them, Batterson Park Pond. This was the third hearing. It did not produce a vote, and it was never going to.
What it produced was a redesign. Attorney Robert Reeve told the commission Noble would propose "a significant change in the stormwater management design to include a biofiltration system," and the project engineer, Taylor Capel, walked through it: out go the three hydrodynamic separators, in come Contech "jellyfish" filters — underground units named for the cartridges that dangle inside them like tentacles — plus a biofiltration tree vault at the driveway and roof drains rerouted to feed the nearer vernal pool. There was a watershed calculation involving 48 acres and a five-percent reduction, and a snow-storage plan rated, with a precision the season rarely rewards, for a five-inch storm.
It was an impressive answer to where the water goes. The trouble was the one Commissioner Robert Eisner surfaced with a single question: had the engineer ever installed a jellyfish system before? "I have personally not," Capel said. The room noticed. So did Anna Swinbourne, the chief executive of the Hill-Stead Museum, who told the commission that resting the project's protections on a system its own engineer hasn't used "is a red flag," and that she'd "hate to see Farmington become a guinea pig."
That set the tone for public comment, which ran to roughly nineteen speakers, none of them in favor. Jon Schoenhorn, who chairs the town's Zoning Board of Appeals, warned that diesel in a wetland "is difficult, if not impossible, to remediate." Kate Emery, who founded the Farmington firm The Walker Group, asked what the project does for the community and answered her own question. New Britain Alderman John McNamara reported "a groundswell of concern" across the line. And the owner, Michael Frisbie, spent a good stretch insisting on a distinction the crowd would not grant him: "It's not a truck stop. It's a mini travel plaza that we own and operate." The intervener, Attorney Stephanie Roman, and her ecologist had technical questions about particulates and dissolved nitrogen that the applicant mostly promised to answer in writing.
The commission continued the hearing — and Roman's intervener petition with it — to June 3; the full account of the redesign and the opposition runs here. The earliest it can vote is June 17. (Noble needs a separate zone change, too; Planning and Zoning has set that hearing for July 27.)
The other 18 homes
By the time JBS Developers LLC presented its plan for an 18-unit active-adult community on 11.6 acres at 598 Plainville Avenue, the room had thinned. The water question here got a more conventional answer: two detention basins, a small pre-treatment basin spilling into a larger one, and 4.1 acres of open space tied to town land. The commission's main ask was that a wetland delineation behind one unit be upgraded to a fenced conservation easement — split-rail and the town's blue medallions — so future owners don't quietly annex it.
The lone public speaker, Ted Johnson of the abutting Autumn Estates, raised a cumulative question of his own — whether the sewers could take it: with Tanbark Trail and Autumn Estates and Farmington West already built, can the system absorb 18 more homes? The engineer said it should. The hearing was continued to June 3.
Order, eventually
The rest was housekeeping with a New England accent. A Burke Aerospace sign needs to move out of the town right-of-way, and staff can handle it as long as nobody clears any wetland to make it visible. A West Avon Road application was held to keep the night from running longer than it already had. The town attorney will come to a future meeting to explain the order in which the commission has to vote on Noble — the petition first, then the application — because the sequence matters and nobody wants a procedural do-over.
Then the commission closed the wetlands meeting at 9:54 and immediately reconvened as the Conservation Commission, discovered it had left the JBS item off its own agenda, voted to put it back on, and voted again to recommend the easement. Disorder into order, one motion at a time.
It was, in other words, a typical night: a lot of water, a lot of questions about where it goes, and a commission methodically making everyone show their work. Most of the answers are due back June 3.
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road — the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. A wetlands commission spends its evenings asking where the water goes; Farmington Storage has built a business on the answer being "nowhere near your things." 860.777.4001 📦
— Jack Beckett has covered the Farmington wetlands commission long enough to know that "where does the water go" is the only question that has ever been asked in that room, and possibly the only one that matters. He is on his third coffee. It is, he notes, draining properly. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering — the patio, the post-fire rebuild, the 86-acre diesel fight, and the eighteen homes nobody noticed because they came up after the crowd went home. We publish slowly, deliberately, and without apology. We are always last to breaking news and thorough about everything else. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰