Noble Energy Redesigns Its Stormwater Plan; Farmington Wetlands Hearing Continues to June 3
Noble Energy came back to the Farmington Inland Wetlands Commission on Wednesday with a new way to clean the water that would run off its proposed diesel travel center near Batterson Park Pond. By the end of the night, the most quoted objection in the room was about the new system itself — that the company had admitted it has never installed one.
"A lot of the mitigation rests on this jellyfish filtration system that they have admitted they don't have direct experience using," said Anna Swinbourne, the chief executive of the Hill-Stead Museum, who lives on Mountain Road. "I would hate to see, in an instance such as this, that Farmington become a guinea pig."
That tension — a redesigned plan built around technology the project's own engineer has not used before — ran through a hearing that lasted the better part of two hours, drew roughly nineteen public speakers, and ended the way the April hearing and the May 6 session both ended: with no vote. The commission continued the public hearing, and the intervener's petition along with it, to its next meeting on Wednesday, June 3. The earliest the commission could vote, by its own count, is June 17.
What changed
Noble Energy Real Estate Holdings wants to build on roughly 86 acres at 8261 Fienemann Road, at the corner of Slater Road, where Farmington meets New Britain. The plan is an 18,000-square-foot warehouse and an 8,400-square-foot travel center with a diesel fueling station — both already scaled back from a larger version filed in the spring. Two vernal pools sit on the site, and Batterson Park Pond sits downstream.
The change Noble brought Wednesday was to the stormwater system. Attorney Robert J. Reeve told the commission the company would propose "a significant change in the stormwater management design to include a biofiltration system," and the project engineer, Taylor Capel of Solli Engineering, walked through the specifics.
In place of the three hydrodynamic separators Noble had previously proposed, the new plan uses Contech "jellyfish" filters — underground units, named for the cartridges that hang inside them, that the company says capture trash, sediment and the dissolved pollutants that earlier designs left untreated. Copper and zinc, the dissolved metals raised at earlier hearings, were the explicit targets. A second device — a biofiltration tree vault at the Slater Road entrance — would replace a catch basin and send treated water toward the nearer vernal pool to help recharge it. The travel center's roof drains would be rerouted the same way.
Capel also presented the watershed math the company is leaning on. The northern vernal pool draws from a watershed of about 48 acres, much of it New Britain's storm-sewer system. The development, he said, would remove about 2.4 acres from that watershed — under 5 percent — leaving the pool, in his framing, with more than enough water. William Kenny, the project's wetland scientist, argued the northern pool has both an inlet and an outlet and a watershed large enough that the reduction would not threaten the depth and duration the pool's amphibians need to breed.
The plans reflecting all of this do not exist yet. Reeve said the revised drawings would be ready next week, which is why the company asked to continue the hearing rather than close it.
The questions Noble could not answer Wednesday
The intervener — Attorney Stephanie Roman, who owns property at 1292-1294 Slater Road in New Britain and filed her petition under the state's Environmental Protection Act — brought her own scientist, ecologist Sigrun Gadwa of Carya Ecological Services, who appeared remotely.
Gadwa's questions were technical, and most of them ended with the applicant promising a written answer. Do the jellyfish filters capture the finest particles, the ones that carry the polyaromatic hydrocarbons diesel traffic leaves on pavement? What are the dissolved-nitrate removal rates — the figure that matters most for Batterson Park Pond? She also argued that the project misunderstands what the vernal pool needs: not just a volume of water, but groundwater that has moved slowly downhill through the soil, picking up the minerals and organic matter that sustain the plant community at the base of the slope. Roof runoff, she said, does not carry those constituents.
Commissioner Robert Eisner pressed the point that became the night's refrain. He asked Capel whether he had used the jellyfish system on other projects he had managed. "I have personally not," Capel answered, adding that the company had been in conversation with the manufacturer to learn the technology. Eisner also asked the commission's engineer to consider whether the redesign could include habitat enhancements, not just impact reduction.
Gadwa flagged one more item: a state-listed plant, lizard's tail, identified on the site. Kenny said the plant was found at the southern pool and that the finding had not yet been reported to the state's Natural Diversity Data Base. Commissioner Elena Carvath asked when that report would be filed. The answer, again, was that it was being evaluated.
"It's not a truck stop"
Chair Ned Statchen said he had looked at one of Noble's existing stations, in Enfield, on Google Street View, and asked owner Michael Frisbie about its two canopies. Frisbie explained that one is for electric-vehicle fast charging, and used the opening to push back on the word that has followed the project since it was filed.
"It's not a truck stop," Frisbie said. "It's a mini travel plaza that we own and operate." National truck stops, he argued, run to fifteen or thirty acres with hundreds of overnight spaces and contracts with national logistics fleets; his model serves local and regional trucks that those contracts leave out.
Not everyone accepted the distinction. "From what I have read, there is no legal differentiation between travel center and truck stop," said Denise Ortiz, a New Britain resident who walked the commission through the state statutes that govern its work and raised the prospect of environmental-justice impacts on the dense neighborhood across the line.
A room that had made up its mind
Public comment ran one direction. Nineteen or so speakers rose, in the annex and online, and not one spoke in favor.
The objections sorted into a few piles. Diesel itself: Jon Schoenhorn, who chairs Farmington's Zoning Board of Appeals, told the commission that once diesel reaches a wetland, "it stays for a very long time. It is difficult, if not impossible, to remediate." Albert Rosman, who said he drove a tractor-trailer for 41 years, described the residue that comes off tires onto the road. Health: Candida Flores said she worried about a grandson with chronic asthma. The filters' upkeep, twenty years out, if the business changes hands. The habitat. The traffic.
And the pond. Kathy Howell Talmont, who lives on Batterson Pond, said she had come "to speak for the beleaguered, ignored, and abused Batterson Pond," and that approval would be "the final nail in the coffin." Kate Emery, who founded the Farmington technology firm The Walker Group, asked the question underneath most of the others: "If it's not doing anything positive for our community, screw the money — let's pay attention to what's good for the town." John McNamara, a New Britain alderman who represents the Ward 4 that includes the Batterson Park area, told the commission there is "a groundswell of concern" on the New Britain side.
Evan Coles, of Main Street, asked the commission to make a conservation easement over the rest of the property a condition of any approval, pointing to a staff comment that had requested exactly that.
What comes next
The commission continued Noble's hearing to June 3 and continued Roman's intervener petition to the same date. Staff said the town attorney would attend that meeting, or the one after, to walk the commission through the order in which it has to vote — first on the petition, then on the application. Once the hearing closes, no new information can be submitted, and the commission has up to 35 days to decide. The clock, by the commission's accounting, still has roughly 50 days of extension left in it.
The wetlands commission is only one of the approvals Noble needs. The town's Planning and Zoning Commission has scheduled its own hearing on the rezoning the project requires for July 27.
For now, the drawings are due next week, the written answers are due after that, and Farmington's slowest civic process grinds on, one Wednesday at a time.
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road — the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. A diesel travel center argues about what it might let into the groundwater for years; Farmington Storage keeps what you hand it under conditions a museum would recognize. The contrast is free of charge. 860.777.4001 📦
— Jack Beckett has covered Farmington's wetlands commission long enough to know the difference between a hydrodynamic separator and a jellyfish filter, which is not a sentence he expected to write this year. He is on his third coffee. The hearing was two hours. One of those things helped. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering — the wetlands hearing that ran past nine, the zoning fight on the New Britain line, the vote that decides what gets built next to the pond your kids can no longer swim in. 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 📰