The 86-acre parcel at 8261 Fienemann Road has roughly seven and a half acres you can build on. The rest is wetland, flood zone, or wetland buffer, and most of that — a 50-plus-acre piece — sits inside a planned conservation easement of roughly 75 acres in total. Whatever Noble Energy Real Estate Holdings wants to put on the parcel has to fit in the corner where Fienemann Road meets the I-84 ramps.
That is the geometry. Wednesday night at One Monteith Drive, it became the story.
Noble Energy came back to the Conservation and Inland Wetlands Commission with a smaller plan than the one the commission had pushed back on the last time. The 4,500-square-foot restaurant on the northeast corner — gone. The warehouse, cut from 28,000 square feet to 18,000. The travel center, trimmed from 10,000 square feet to about 8,400. Sixty-eight parking spaces, removed. The retaining wall behind the warehouse, pulled from six feet off the wetlands edge to ten. Total wetlands impact, reduced from about 3,700 square feet to under 1,000.
For an applicant returning to a wetlands commission, that is roughly the version of the script you would write.
The public, when its turn came, wanted to talk about something else.
Seven and a Half Acres of Buildable Earth
Taylor Capel, a licensed professional engineer with Solli Engineering of Monroe, walked the commission through the parcel before he walked it through the changes. Eighty-six acres total. Three wetland areas, the largest covering most of the western and southern portion of the property. A FEMA 100-year flood zone running the drainage channel from I-84 down into Batterson Park Pond. A buildable footprint of about seven and a half acres, all of it clustered in the eastern corner where Fienemann meets the highway ramps.
The development team also included Michael Frisbie, the contracted buyer for the parcel, and Jackson Smith and Bill Kenny of William Kenny Associates, the Fairfield-based ecological and wetlands consultancy on the project. Bill Kenny dialed in remote.
The original plan was three uses on one site: a 28,000-square-foot warehouse with thirty-four tractor-trailer spaces — "an out and back facility," Capel said, where vehicles "leave for the day and come back," not long-haul — a travel center with five high-speed diesel pumps and sixteen gasoline pumps, and a 4,500-square-foot restaurant with no outdoor seating. Wetlands impact came in at roughly 3,700 square feet, mitigation at roughly 3,500 — slightly under one-to-one.
The revised plan keeps the same number of fuel pumps but removes the restaurant, shrinks the travel center and the warehouse, repositions the Slater Road driveway to line up with the apartment complex across the street (Capel called the existing offset "not ideal" from a traffic perspective), and pulls the warehouse and its parking further off the FEMA flood line. Total impact is now under 1,000 square feet — most of the previous footprint absorbed back into the easement.
Four Comments, Mostly About Roads
The chair of the commission, Ned Stachen, opened the public portion. Nobody in the chambers stood up. The commission recently returned to in-person hearings after years of remote-only meetings; on Wednesday, the public still preferred Zoom.
The first hand belonged to David Shlasky of 85 Royal Oak Road, who introduced himself as a Farmington resident whose only road in is through New Britain. His concern was traffic. Fienemann Road already backs up "30 or 40 cars" at four o'clock in the afternoon, Shlasky said, and the merge from the I-84 off-ramp goes from two lanes to one. Adding a 24-hour travel center and a warehouse with tractor-trailer turnover would not, in his account, improve that.
Eugene Ng, of 24 Skylark Court in New Britain, dialed in next. He seconded the road-widening concern and added one of his own: the truck turning radius. "It doesn't feel like it would fit on that road," he said. He also pointed out that any widening would push the project right back at the wetlands the redesign had just stepped away from. Then he flagged Frisbie's Dairy Barn — the long-running ice cream institution at 951 Farmington Avenue in New Britain — as a reminder that this stretch of road is not as commercial-by-default as it looks from the highway. There are residents here, and so far they have shared the road mostly with cars.
Then attorney Jeffrey Dressler, dialing in from 84 Cedar Street in Hartford, named the schools.
"There are four schools within a half a mile of this development. DiLoreto, Academy of Science and Innovation, E.C. Goodwin Technical High School, and Jefferson Elementary. They're all serviced by school buses."
Three of the four sit on Slater Road in New Britain, within a few minutes' drive of the parcel. The Academy of Science and Innovation is at 600 Slater. E.C. Goodwin Technical is at 735. Jefferson Elementary and the DiLoreto magnet are nearby on the same corridor. Dressler's argument was that morning and afternoon school-bus traffic would compete directly with truck traffic in and out of a 24-hour travel center. He went on to question stormwater runoff into Batterson Park Pond — already an impaired water body, owned by the City of Hartford and serving as the headwaters of Bass Brook in the Park River watershed — along with noise, light, and property-value impacts on the residential neighborhoods just east. "I just don't see it working there," he said.
The last comment came from Stephanie Roman, the property owner of 1292–1294 Slater Road, who had submitted a five-page written opposition on April 8. She had not yet had time to review the revised plan, she said, but she stood by her earlier filing and asked the commission for a continuance so that staff and commenters could finish reviewing the new design. She also wanted more information about the FlexStorm pure inserts the applicant had referenced as a stormwater treatment measure.
Stachen and the Geometry Trap
Stachen acknowledged that traffic — including road widening — sits within the Town Plan and Zoning Commission's purview rather than Inland Wetlands'. But he did not let the road question pass without naming the trap it sets for a project sitting on this parcel.
"If we do expand the road, then we're going to encroach more on the wetlands on either side."
Capel agreed. Wetlands sit on the north side of Fienemann Road, too, across from the project parcel. Widening the road to relieve congestion or accommodate trucks would push the project right back into the wetland buffer the new design had been pulled away from. It is the kind of small geometric problem that is hard to argue with.
Michael Frisbie, the contracted buyer, told the commission he had held an informal meeting at Frisbie's Dairy Barn the night before the hearing with abutters who had received notice. He committed on the record that if the traffic study Solli Engineering is preparing for TPZ submission identifies off-site improvements — signal changes, lane reconfigurations, anything of that kind — the applicant team would pay to make them. He cited a project the team is currently working on in East Hartford, where it is replacing a traffic signal and changing the traffic patterns at "significant cost," for the same reason.
Senior Assistant Town Planner Bruce Cyr noted Roman's written opposition is on the SharePoint and part of the record. The wetlands scientists have not yet completed their second site review. The commission is not voting on Noble Energy at this meeting.
Stachen closed the public hearing the way Cyr had suggested he should: held open. The matter is continued to the commission's next meeting, on Wednesday, May 6.
Three Things on May 6
The May 6 hearing will sit on three things.
First, the staff wetlands review — whether the second site visit confirms the under-1,000-square-foot impact figure matches the field, and whether the FlexStorm pure inserts, the conservation easement language, and the mitigation calculations satisfy the commission technically.
Second, whether anything that arrives in writing between now and then materially changes the picture.
Third, whether the four-schools-in-a-half-mile argument — procedurally a TPZ concern about traffic and circulation, not strictly a wetlands concern — bleeds back into the wetlands record by way of road-widening proposals that would, in turn, push the project back at the wetlands. That is a circular argument. It is also a real one.
For the applicant, Wednesday was a textbook return: smaller plan, lower impact, one use eliminated, parking trimmed, retaining wall pulled. For the commenters, Wednesday was a return to a familiar framing: half a mile, four schools, school buses, an already-impaired pond at the bottom of the drainage channel.
The commission will hear them again on May 6.
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